Lou Schillaci and his co-director Claire Linley founded their flat panel display mounting company six years ago. 
Three years ago they filed for the skunkworks trademark in Australia and Lockheed Martin objected.
Of course, Skunk Works is a term that was first coined in 1943 by Lockheed, currently trademarked by Lockheed Martin and widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.
Their pair, without any assistance from lawyers, fought Lockheed Martin by themselves and won! Lou Schillaci told SmartCompany “We have put a lot of time into building the brand – our IP is so quirky that people remember it and that is the whole point. We look at web stats and the just 1% of people who used to come to our site by the word ‘skunkworks’ is up to 17% now, so that tells us people remember it and that is worth money to us.”
In case there was any doubt, Schillaci’s company, Skunkworks Pacific comes up #1 in Google for the term skunkworks.
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Tags: australia, business, domain name law, lockheed martin, lou schillaci, skunk, skunkworks
