Legal threat no red herring

The brand uses Wick's seafaring tradition as a symbol

A tiny Highland distillery has been forced to change the name of its newsletter because of a threat of legal action by an American internet giant.

The Old Pulteney distillery in Wick, Caithness, received a strongly worded letter after publishing the newsletter, for a handful of customers, called The Red Herring.

The name relates to Wick's past as the world's largest fishing port, but US publisher Red Herring Communications, which issues a magazine of the same name, warned the distillery to stop using the title.

A lawyer's letter to Old Pulteney said: "The names being identical and covering the same field, namely publications, there is a conflict of interest."

The newsletter reaches 3,000 people

The distillery was warned that unless the Red Herring name was withdrawn from the newsletter or any printed magazine, "a lawsuit for infringement of trademark name of or trademark awaits the publishers".

A spokesman for Airdrie-based Inver House Distillers, which owns the Wick plant, said: "We are hardly competing with them in any way. I am amazed they even bothered.

"However, we are having to re-launch the newsletter and call it The Official Line from Old Pulteney."

The modest, and recently introduced, whisky newsletter has a readership target of 3,000 while the web magazine reaches a huge audience.

It was originally conceived by the Old Pulteney Society, which is dedicated to the whisky's lovers.

The first issue of the newsletter congratulated readers on becoming "one of the first members of the Old Pulteney Society, a group of enthusiasts who truly appreciate 'uisque beatha'"...water of life."

Newsletter editor Margaret Mary Timpson with the offending item

It adds: "Welcome also to the inaugural issue of Red Herring, the 'Official Line from Old Pulteney', which pledges to give all the news about the brand as well as a light-hearted look at life in Pultneytown."

Pulteneytown, the area of Wick where the distillery has been since it was founded in 1826, is named after Sir William Pulteney, a Scots-born MP of two centuries ago, who changed his name from plain Bill Johnstone when he married into a wealthy English aristocratic family.

He was a chairman of the British Fisheries Society, which put up the cash to build the harbour at Wick and a new settlement on the south side of the town to house fishers and others involved in the herring trade.

When the distillery was founded in 1826 herring was Wick's most important catch.

The plant is sited and named after a Wick suburb built in the early 19th century to house workers for the then booming fishing industry.

At its peak, the industry employed around 10,000 people - fishermen, fish-curers, girl herring-gutters and associated trades.