Trademark law intersects with First Amendment free speech rights in several key ways: Prior Restraint and Content-Based Restrictions: When the government denies trademark registration based on the...
The false suggestion doctrine is a limitation on trademark registration, designed to protect the public from misleading associations with recognized entities or symbols. Overview Section 2(a) of the...
Understanding Trademark Genericism Trademark law exists to protect distinctive marks that identify the source of a particular good or service. However, when a trademark becomes so widely known that...
Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Matal v. Tam, decided in 2017, and Iancu v. Brunetti, decided this past May, both dealt with registration of trademarks under 15 U.S.C. §1052(a) (§2(a))...
Source: FUCT™, soon to be FUCT® On June 24, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Iancu v. Brunetti, dealing with the Lanham Act’s Section 2(a) bars to trademark registration’s collision against...
On December 15, 2017, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit handed down its decision in In re Brunetti. In Brunetti, the Federal Circuit panel, consisting of Judges Moore,...
On November 14, 2017, six years to the day after the application was first filed with the USPTO which precipitated the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Matal v. Tam[1] striking down the...
On June 26, 2017, the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued an updated Examination Guideline 01-17, consistent with the recent Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S.\\\_ (2017), ruling by the United...
By Brent T. Yonehara On June 19, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court finally, and somewhat as expected, handed down its ruling in Matal v. Tam (formerly Lee v. Tam). By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court...