You Can’t Trademark “Hot Girls Read” (Cockygate Proved It)

Okay, so somebody trademarked “hot girls read.” The actual phrase. And then started gently letting other shops know their merch needed to come down. Three little words that have been on tote bags and bookmarks since basically the dawn of bookstagram. I can confirm because I’ve been here since then.

And if you’ve been hanging around romance long enough, your stomach just did the exact flip mine did. Because we have absolutely done this before. It even had a name, Cockygate. So pour yourself something, get comfortable, and let me take you back to 2018 because it’s a wild little story, and it ends in a way that matters a lot for right now.

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The Cockygate of it all

Here’s how it went down. A romance author named Faleena Hopkins trademarked the word cocky. Not a logo, not a design, but the plain everyday adjective for romance titles, off the back of her Cocker Brothers series. And then she came for everyone else using it. Cease and desist letters were sent. Authors getting their books pulled off Amazon. Genuine chaos.

One writer, Jamila Jasper, rather than fight, simply renamed her book Cocky Cowboy to The Cockiest Cowboy to Have Ever Cocked, which remains the single greatest act of petty genius this genre has ever produced. Another author, Tara Crescent, had cocky titled books that came out before the trademark even existed and got hit anyway.

The romance community lost its entire mind. Rightfully so! #CockyGate was everywhere. And it got serious fast: the Authors Guild and Romance Writers of America lawyered up, an attorney named Kevin Kneupper filed to cancel the trademark, and a whole crew of authors threw together a protest anthology to fund the fight.

What the judge actually said

And then comes the part I actually need you to remember. It went in front of a federal judge. Alvin Hellerstein, down in the Southern District of New York. He said, basically, what every one of us already knew in our bones: cocky is a common word, and that makes it a weak trademark.

The filing had even tried to argue that romance readers were impulsive little things who’d get confused and grab the wrong book by accident. The judge wasn’t buying that for a second, he figured we were plenty sharp enough to tell one author’s book from another over a single shared word. (Correct, your honor.) No real confusion, no injunction. And not long after, the trademarks got withdrawn entirely, and cocky went right back to all of us, where it belonged the whole time.

So here’s what I want you to take out of this whole cockygate fiasco, because it’s just how the thing works: you can’t own a common word, or a common phrase, unless the whole world genuinely thinks of it as yours, and only yours. “Cocky” flunked that test in about an afternoon. “Hot girls read”, a phrase an entire community has been using for over a decade and that nobody on this earth associates with one single shop, flunks it for the exact same reason.

Why I kept the receipt

Listen, I’m not pulling all this off a Wikipedia tab. I was here for it, and I’ve got the receipt sitting on my shelf.

That cockygate protest anthology I mentioned? It’s called Cocktales: The Cocky Collective, and every dollar went to the authors tangled up in the mess. I bought it as soon as it went up for sale, and it’s lived on my shelf ever since. If you flip it over, the back cover says it outright: the entire point was to push back on people trying to trademark common, everyday words and block everyone else’s creativity. They called it in 2018. Nothing’s actually changed. The fight just showed back up this year in cuter merch.

Funny enough though, the hot girls read trademark isn’t the only one. There were a few more that are currently pending, including a trademark for “book boyfriend”. Hello?

Final Thoughts

I do want to be clear about one thing, because this isn’t a pile-on and I’m not out to drag a human being. That’s not my style. I don’t know what’s in anyone’s heart and I’m not going to pretend I do. But I do care about the principle because it keeps coming back around. The language a community builds belongs to that community. Build your brand inside it. Truly, go for it. You just don’t get to put walls around it and start charging the rest of us to walk through.

We’ve seen this movie. We know how it ends. And if you didn’t know about it before, now you do.

So tell me in the comments if you were around for Cockygate the first time. And if you want to know more about the genre, check out my genre 101 series where we discuss all about genres and book, including genre history tidbits like this one!

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