WashingtonPost: Protecting Its Proprietary Pork

Seems like they've gotten a late start on this, but Hormel Foods has finally gotten around to suing someone to protect the trademark of its famous luncheon meat Spam from its synonym status with junk email. Specifically, it's suing junk-mail filtering tool Spam Arrest. I'm no lawyer, but shouldn't they have started complaining about this years ago? No matter how you slice it, "spam" is in the public vocabulary as evil email, and I highly doubt Hormel can fix that now with lawsuits.