It is frequently becoming more and more difficult to remember all the topics we’ve covered here over the last — almost — nine years. A recent Snickers end cap display jogged my memory:
Turns out, eight months into this little adventure we call DuetsBlog, I wrote a blog post called Delicious Trademarks: Candy Bar Cross-Section
Today I write with a thought-provoking question: Just who owns the trademark rights to Telsa/SpaceX’s Spaceman Roadster? Tesla? SpaceX? Perhaps even humanity?
If you didn’t catch it, SpaceX recently launched its first Falcon Heavy three-booster rocket designed to carry large payloads into space. In a stunning feat of engineering and genius marketing, the rocket sent
Words and pictures are so 2017. This year, it is all about the non-traditional trademarks (i.e., something other than brand names and images). In the past, we’ve covered a variety of these types of trademarks, from colors to product shapes, to sounds and even the touch of a product. Even looking only at college
We continue to have Super Bowl LII on our minds here in the Twin Cities. It’s hard to avoid thinking about the upcoming “Big Game” with ads like these blanketing our skyway maze:
Turns out, everyone wants to have a little piece of the action in this upcoming event, even without the
December is one of the largest shopping months of the year, due mostly to the overlap of multiple major holidays, such as Hanukkah and Christmas, and the coming new year. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that several companies and creatives invoke the spirit of the holidays through festive marks–to great financial gain. But you
-Martha Engel, Attorney
To me, one of the most exciting aspects of intellectual property law is when patent law and trademark law intersect in product or packaging design. Last week, I had the honor of speaking to a graduate product design class at the University of Minnesota’s School of Design, where I discussed the valuable
Growing up with a farm in the family, I learned early on that Nothing Runs Like Deere®. As people tend to do, we named all of the tractors – after Masters of the Universe characters, of course. There was a front-loader type tractor of a brand I don’t recall named Skelator, another old tractor
Normally when we talk about stripes trademarks , we’re talking about iconic sportswear brand adidas. An avid litigant with respect to use of “three stripe” designs on footwear and clothing, adidas is a regular feature here at DuetsBlog, where we have discussed disputes with lululemon, Puma, and retail store Forever 21. But
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
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