We’ve been down this road before, some themes intersect, and trademark value is filtered out:
The intersecting themes on tap for the day are: Zero, Branding, Trademarks, and Loss of Rights.
ZEROWATER is a perfectly suggestive, inherently distinctive, and federally-registered trademark with “incontestable” status as a source-identifier for “water filtering units
One of my passions is to find common and favorable ground between legal and marketing types.
One of the readings during week three of Seth Godin’s intensive altMBA workshop reminded me of a great example to illustrate how a valid marketing goal can align with strong legal protection.
An excerpt from Seth’s All Marketers are
We’ve written quite a bit over the years about the Spectrum of Distinctiveness for trademarks, and the all-important difference between suggestive marks and merely descriptive ones, with only the former being allowed immediate rights based on first use.
Creativity is what separates the power of suggestion from the weakness and limbo of descriptiveness.
World-famous chef Wolfgang Puck recently became embroiled in a trademark battle with Elon Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who owns The Kitchen Cafe, a family of restaurants in Boulder, Fort Collins, Denver, Glendale, and Chicago. Puck has opened new restaurants with the names “The Kitchen by Wolfgang Puck” and “The
An oil change and tire rotation over the holiday yielded a little free time for me in our local Goodyear dealer’s waiting room, and it left me wondering about the Outrageously Dependable tagline of Interstate Batteries, so I captured the above image to tell a little blogworthy — if not blimpworthy — trademark story.
My
Why does Smashburger continue down this road of smashing its trademark rights?
Especially, despite our previous cautions:
Another Marketing Pitfall: How to Crush a Smashing Brand Name & Trademark
Crushing a Perfectly Good Brand Name?
In the meantime, we’ll keep watching out for marketing pitfalls and unnecessary marketing copy that
There aren’t too many things I enjoy more than speaking about the legal implications of branding.
Our friends at BlackCoffee captured a talk I gave to a group of marketing types a while back, on black and white film (thank goodness), and they have graciously posted a 34 minute excerpt, here.
Some of the topics
–Susan Perera, Attorney
Every once in awhile I run across a product and find myself wondering… why did they name it this? I recently ran across the Duck Tape brand shown below. My first reaction was “duck” is a commonly misused term to identify what should be called “duct” tape, and this brand owner interestingly
In the wake of all the discussion and debate over “trademark bullying,” NFIB (National Federation of Independent Businesses), the self-proclaimed Voice of Small Business, recently offered its members and followers “5 Steps to Avoid Corporate Trademark Bullying“:
This scene from the Minnesota State Fair reveals how the “About a . . . Foot Long Hot Dog” stand is a “State Fair Taste Tradition. . . .” With respect to the name, I have always believed that the “About a . . .” qualifier is lawyer-driven to avoid false advertising lawsuits if a