Hormel’s statement on the use of its trademark.“You’ve probably seen, heard or even used the term ’spamming’ to refer to the act of sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE), or ’spam’ to refer to the UCE itself. Following is our position on the relationship between UCE and our trademark SPAM.

Use of the term ’spam’ was adopted as a result of the Monty Python skit in which our SPAM meat product was featured. In this skit, a group of Vikings sang a chorus of ’spam, spam, spam . . . ‘ in an increasing crescendo, drowning out other conversation. Hence, the analogy applied because UCE was drowning out normal discourse on the Internet.”