–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I should confess, if I haven’t already, that I do not watch much television. I’m not sure if T.V. viewing would have helped me to be more knowledgeable on what follows, but I was surprised on a recent road trip when my wife and I saw a semi trailer splashed with pictures
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
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In March, I commented on the possibility that Victorinox and Wenger, long-time makers of Swiss Army knives, were stretching the Swiss Army brand too far, to the detriment of the overall quality of the goods and the goodwill in the Swiss Army trademarks. A recent development seems to
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Sometimes, when times get tough, a business just cannot afford all the expensive branding, design, marketing, and legal consultants . . . or maybe a business has cornered a market and can simply dispense with all but the most necessary of elements:
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–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Joseph Fabian, an individual from Kalamazoo, Michigan tried to federally register PERCEPTION VS. REALITY DON’T DRINK THE KOOL-AID as a trademark for “A series of books and written articles in the field of investments, taxes and estate planning,”
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Sometimes the world hands you lemons, and sometimes it hands you lemonade . . . or free beer . . . or even free advertising. What serendipity for the Bud Light, Red Stripe, and Blue Moon brands that the media’s most recent tempest in a teapot has culminated in a
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
“In 2006, google was defined in the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb meaning ‘to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.'”
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I recently traveled to Omaha and noticed the following billboard:
For those not familiar with these companies, Qwest Communications is a telecommunications company that services many western states. Cox Communications is another relatively large telecommunications company. Both serve the Omaha area. The billboard is an example of nominative fair use, which Steve
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Back in April, I explained a little bit about how typosquatters can capitalize on direct navigation Internet traffic. I offered an example of the “omitted letter” typo: www.kellggs.com. Well, one omitted letter typo variant of .com is becoming widely available: .cm.
The TLD “.cm” is the country code top-level domain (“ccTLD”)
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
Four weeks ago, I blogged about FaceBook’s ill-advised move to allow unique username URLs. Some time between then and now, FaceBook removed the page where trademark owners could defensively register their marks to prevent others from choosing such marks as user names. Now, a rights holder’s only recourse is to submit
–Dan Kelly, Attorney
I don’t recall what I was doing in January of 2007, but I apparently missed the news that Cisco had sued Apple over Apple’s then-newly announced iPhone product. I actually stumbled upon this accidentally when I recently searched for federal trademark registrations for IPHONE and found only one, and it belongs to Cisco. (PDF here.) Your eyes are not deceiving you: since 1999, IPHONE has been a federally registered trademark for use in connection with “computer hardware and software for providing integrated telephone communication with computerized global information networks,” and Cisco is the current owner of this registration. No joke. Look here.
This raises dozens of questions in my mind, of which I will present only a few.
Q1. Did Apple conduct a trademark search prior to rolling out the iPhone?
Q2. If so, what was the legal and business thought at Apple about Cisco’s IPHONE trademark registration?
Q3. What should a company like Cisco do when a junior user adops an identical trademark for use on identical goods, and the junior user’s product is wildly successful?
My suggested answers are after the jump.Continue Reading Lessons from the iPhone Trademark Spat