Accessibility links

Breaking News

Greta Thunberg Seeks to Trademark her Name to Stem Misuse


FILE - Swedish climate activist and Time's Person of the Year 2019 Greta Thunberg attends a session during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.
FILE - Swedish climate activist and Time's Person of the Year 2019 Greta Thunberg attends a session during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg said on Instagram on Wednesday she has applied to register her name and that of the Fridays For Future movement she founded in 2018, which has gone global and catapulted her to international fame.

The move would allow legal action against persons or companies trying to use her name or the movement's which are not in line with its values, she said.

"I assure you, I and the other school strikers have absolutely no interests in trademarks. But unfortunately it needs to be done," she said on the social network.

Thunberg said she had also applied to trademark "Skolstrejk for klimatet," school strike for the climate in Swedish — the wording on the placard she has held since she started her one-person protest outside the Swedish parliament in 2018, for which she missed school.

"My name and the #FridaysForFuture movement are constantly being used for commercial purposes without any consent whatsoever. It happens for instance in marketing, selling of products and people collecting money in my and the movement's name," she wrote on her Instagram account.

Thunberg, who took center stage at the Global Economic Forum in Davos this month, and her fellow young activists in the movement want politicians to listen to climate scientists and take action to curb global warming.

  • 16x9 Image

    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

XS
SM
MD
LG