Defending D&D?

I keep wanting to make a connection between some defensible "essential properties" of D&D, and established legal protections for food products such as Chocolate, Champagne, Gruyere cheese.

For each of these food products (see Wikipedia), there were companies that would have increased sales and made more money, if they could have labeled their products with these names (and of course, they desired to do so). However, trade groups did manage to defend certain definitions of the products and prohibit other usages.

Most of these defenses have been seen in the form of legal restrictions in the EU. However, you've got at least one case in the US in 2007 where companies wanted to replace cocoa butter with hydrogenated vegetable oil and still label the product as "chocolate", which the FDA shot down.

I like the basic idea of that, although in each case it's a legal construct, and it's hard to see where we could take that with the D&D trademark still currently held by WOTC/Hasbro.

(This post was originally a comment of mine on James Maliszewski's Grognardia blog.)