{"id":2726,"date":"2018-06-11T19:09:29","date_gmt":"2018-06-11T19:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/?page_id=2726"},"modified":"2023-11-02T17:27:17","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T17:27:17","slug":"trademark","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/trademark\/","title":{"rendered":"Trademark issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trademarks\u00a0are legally protected brand names<\/strong> or images that allow commercial identification of goods in the marketplace. For example,\u00a0 \u00a0 Coca-Cola \u00ae is one of the most famous trademarks.<\/p>\r\n

A registered trademark is identified by this symbol:\u00a0 \u00ae\u00a0 .\u00a0 One that is in the process of \u00a0being registered is often given as (TM).<\/p>\r\n

Trademark Duration:<\/strong> Trademarks are renewable indefinitely, however, trademarks must be used or they may be considered abandoned. Aspirin, cellophane, cornflakes, yo-yo, linoleum, and escalator\u00a0are examples of abandoned trademarks.<\/p>\r\n

Trademarks are regulated on the federal level under the\u00a0Lanham Act<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0of 1946 but states also have concurrent jurisdiction. Trademarks are administered by the\u00a0US Patent and Trademarks Office<\/a>, and major controversy is unusual.<\/p>\r\nControversial advertising & trademark issues:<\/span><\/strong><\/em><\/span>\r\n\r\nThe Trump “too small” case\u00a0 – Vidal v. Elster\u00a0<\/a><\/strong>\r\n\r\n\"\"<\/a>\r\n\r\nThe Supreme Court heard arguments Nov. 1, 2023 regarding claims that a\u00a0 trademark was improperly denied for a t-shirt<\/a> that made political comments about Donald Trump.\u00a0 A decision in the case would come towards the end of the term in the spring of 2024.\r\n\r\nBoth conservative and liberal members of the court were skeptical about Elster’s claims. If there is no viewpoint discrimination, there is no First Amendment issue, some justices said.\u00a0 \u00a0Others justices noted the long history of allowing people to control the use of their names in commercial settings.\r\n\r\nTrademark controversies have largely been settled in recent years by Matal v Tam (2017).\u00a0<\/a> and Iancu v Brunetti (2019).<\/a>\r\n\r\nIn Tam, a unanimous court struck down<\/a> part of the trademark law forbidding marks that disparage people, living or dead, along with \u201cinstitutions, beliefs or national symbols.\u201d The theory was that a government-issued trademark was the government speaking, and the government should not disparage.\u00a0 However, the court said that trademark registration did not imply government speech.\r\n\r\nIn the Iancu case, the same theory was struck down but as regarding registration of \u201cimmoral\u201d or \u201cscandalous\u201d trademarks.\u00a0 That case involved\u00a0 a line of clothing labeled\u00a0 FUCT.\u00a0 <\/span>The <\/span>New York Times said<\/a>:\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\r\n

When <\/span>the case was argued<\/a>, Mr. Stewart told the justices that the term was \u201cthe equivalent of the past participle form of the paradigmatic profane word in our culture.\u201d<\/span><\/blockquote>\r\nThe Redskins case\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

Sometimes a dispute see-saws back and forth for decades until public opinion changes and makes the legal issues moot. In the case of the \u00a0Washington Commanders football team\u00a0 <\/a>\u00a0formerly known as the \u201cRedskins,\u201d battles over the status of the disparaging trademark took nearly 30 years to resolve.<\/p>\r\n

The case of the Redskins football team involved controversy over racial stereotyping and laws prohibiting disparagement in copyrights.<\/p>\r\n

\"\"<\/p>\r\n

Under the Lanham Act,\u00a0 trademark registrations cannot be \u201cdisparaging, scandalous, contemptuous, or disreputable.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0The controversy over the Redskins American football team had been brewing since\u00a01992, when Suzan Harjo<\/a> and other Native American activists petitioned the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the registrations owned by the Redskins’ corporate entity of Pro-Football, Inc. They asserted that the trademark \u201cdisparages \u00a0Native Americans and may bring them into contempt or disrepute.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

A second lawsuit was filed in \u00a02006. (See this link for a full list of filings<\/a> and motions). \u00a0Responding to this second suit, on June 18, 2015, \u00a0the Trademark Trial & Appeal Board of the Federal Patent and Trademarks Office agreed with the contention that the term \u201credskins\u201d is disparaging. That decision was upheld by a federal appeals court\u00a0<\/a>in 2016<\/p>\r\n

However,\u00a0 in a related 2017 case\u00a0 Matal v Tam<\/a>, the US Supreme Court reversed the appeals court, overturned the section of the Lanham Act that\u00a0 prohibited disparagement,\u00a0 and reversed the underlying doctrine assuming that a trademark approval was in effect a function of governmental speech which could not be disparaging.<\/p>\r\n

In 2019, a similar case, Iancu v Brunetti<\/a>, allowed trademark registration of a clothing line called “Fuct.”<\/p>\r\n

USA Today said<\/a>:\u00a0 “Legally speaking, the team won. Culturally speaking, Native American petitioners believe they did.” Amanda Blackhorse said:\u00a0 \u201cWe said the term \u2018Redskins\u2019 is disparaging and the courts agreed with us. It\u2019s just that now the Supreme Court says it\u2019s OK to register a disparaging term.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

The Iancu and Matal cases would have allowed the Redskins to retain their original name. However, in 2021, the Washington DC football team decided that the controversy had damaged their reputation, and changed their name to the Commanders.\u00a0 This brought “a sense of closure”<\/a> to the Native American groups who had been seeking a legal change to the trademark.<\/p>\r\nDOMAIN NAMES\u00a0<\/strong>\r\n

A domain name is in effect a trademark for your company or your work.\u00a0 As a consumer, you can register an internet domain names through a variety of internet service providers (ISPs) and web hosts. Disputes over domain names, are now decided by the World Intellectual Property Organization<\/a>, an outgrowth of the Berne\u00a0 international copyright convention based in\u00a0 Switzerland.<\/p>\r\n

Under US law, especially the Lanham Act, a trademark can’t be used by someone offering a similar product or service.\u00a0 The law covers domain names as well as other forms of advertising.<\/p>\r\n

When the web first came along<\/strong> in the 1990s, five top level domain names —\u00a0 com, .org, .gov, .edu, .mil.\u00a0 \u00a0— were intended to serve US and English-speaking countries. There were also dozens of country codes — .uk for United Kingdom, .ca for Canada, and so on.<\/p>\r\n

The web quickly outgrew the original system, and an Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) was established in the US in 1998. Its technical functions continued for the US and other countries as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA<\/a>), and new \u00a0generic top level domains\u00a0 (gTLDs) were introduced in 2013.\u00a0 These included .aero, .asia, .biz, .cat, .com, .coop, .info, .jobs, .mobi, .museum, .name, .net, .org, .pro, .tel and travel.<\/p>\r\n

However, as the job became increasingly complex and internationally oriented, its oversight and dispute resolution were transferred to WIPO in 2016.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trademarks\u00a0are legally protected brand names or images that allow commercial identification of goods in the marketplace. For example,\u00a0 \u00a0 Coca-Cola \u00ae is one of the most famous trademarks. A registered trademark is identified by this symbol:\u00a0 \u00ae\u00a0 .\u00a0 One that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2726","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2726"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6074,"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2726\/revisions\/6074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revolutionsincommunication.com\/law\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}