Roberto Escobar appears to want to keep banging his head against this particular brick wall for some reason. Roberto, brother to infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, has been trying to assert trademark and other rights to his brother’s name for years now. It started in Columbia, in which the country flat out refused to grant him the mark out of concern that the public would not be served by any commerce occurring using that name, given its history. Then he tried to extort a billion dollars out of Netflix over the show Narcos under the novel theory that his relationship with his brother and his distaste for the creative license used within the show. That ended up in an undisclosed settlement.
And now Roberto has failed once more, this time in his attempt to secure a trademark for his brother’s name in the EU.
The General Court of the European Court of Justice denied an appeal from Roberto Escobar, the brother of the late Medellín Cartel leader, who asked the Luxembourg-based court to overturn a rejection from the EU’s trademark office to protect the name “Pablo Escobar.”
Consumers would “associate the name of Pablo Escobar with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting therefrom,” the court wrote.
The board went on to remind Roberto, who really shouldn’t need to be reminded, that the body count his brother rung up is at least in the triple digits and that he is also most famous for his work as a narcotics kingpin. Roberto, laughably, claimed that denying the trademark due to his brother’s involvement in the drug trade was not valid since Pablo had never been convicted of any crimes specifically on the drugs side of things. Roberto also acknowledges having worked for, and going to jail for, being a member of the Medellin Cartel. Pretending like any of this hinges on the technicality over what specifically Pablo was convicted of is hilarious.
Look, this is a money-grab, and one that Roberto has been working on long before his brother found himself with an extra hole in his head on a rooftop in Columbia.
Prior to his brother’s death in a police raid in 1993, Roberto Escobar had already sought to capitalize on the family name. He registered a company in Colombia in 1984 and has brought legal action against companies that have referenced Escobar.
Pending any appeal in the EU courts, it appears Roberto has racked up another loss with this latest attempt to capitalize on his infamous brother’s name.
