For the past couple years, General Mills has battled to register a yellow color mark in connection with its Cheerios® breakfast cereal.  More specifically, back in 2015, General Mills applied to register (Serial No. 86757390) the mark shown below, described as “the color yellow appearing as the predominant uniform background color on product packaging

If you’re a video game fan like me, you’re probably familiar with Blizzard Entertainment and their assortment of popular games, such as Starcraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft. One of Blizzard’s newest games is Overwatch, a multi-player, first-person shooter game. One aspect of this game is the Overwatch League, a series of tournaments

The weather is finally getting warmer up here in Minnesota and it’s a great time to watch baseball, as I’ve been doing frequently of late. It’s been fun watching my home team, the Twins, enjoy a strong start to the season (anything above .500 is huge after our record-breaking disappointment last year), with our younger

A specialty coffee roastery in San Francisco, Supersonic Coffee, has decided to rebrand to the name AKA Coffee, as reported yesterday.  The impetus for the rebrand was an opposition at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) by the national fast-food chain Sonic, against Supersonic Coffee’s trademark application for the word mark SUPERSONIC.  

By Larry Page. CC BY 2.0.
Posted on Flickr by Larry Page. License: CC BY 2.0.

If you’re ever driving north through Michigan, particularly during the autumn leaf season, I highly recommend taking the popular “scenic route,” that is, the route bordering the shore of Lake Michigan along the Leelanau Peninsula, following State Highway M-22.  Last year,

-Martha Engel, Attorney

Government approval of commercial speech has been a hot topic of discussion by trademark nerds here and elsewhere in light of recent decisions regarding the Redskins and The Slants marks.  As those decisions proceed up through the appeal channels to the Supreme Court, attention has been drawn to whether or not a

-Martha Engel, Attorney

When an application has been refused registration in view of another’s prior filed mark, one way to resolve the issue is through a consent agreement wherein the registrant consents to the registration and the parties set out the reasons why the parties believe that there is no likelihood of consumer confusion between

williamThe celebrity known as will.i.am from the musical group the Black Eyed Peas sought to register three marks for “I AM” in connection with cosmetics, cell phones, artificial eyelashes, sunglasses, and brass wrist cuff bracelets, among other goods.

In three precedential opinions,the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) refused to register these marks based on