One of my friends, when playing blackjack and asked to “cut the deck” after it has been shuffled, consistently admonishes without hesitation: “Thin to win.”
Given the trademark story for today, you may end up believing the opposite.
A 6-year trademark fight between Frito-Lay and Real Foods ended this month.
Frito-Lay opposed Real Foods’
‘Tis the season for gratitude and thankfulness, and avoiding conflict and fruitcake.
From a trademark perspective, every season is for avoiding genericness, right?
After all, generic designations are part of the public domain, they aren’t own-able.
So, why is Guaranteed Rate continuing to invest in Rate.com, found to be generic
The saltiest trademark news in the last week surrounds singer Cardi B’s application to register the marks “Okurr” and “Okurrr,” both slang for “Okay???”–but pronounced in a hip, rolled-r trill, sometimes with a shady tone. Or, as Cardi describes, it: the sound of a “cold pigeon in New York City.” If you haven’t heard it
No worries, I’m back at the keyboard, refreshed after a busy January, from the ATA Show in Louisville to Las Vegas for the SHOT Show, then Austin, and well beyond.
2019 is off to a rapid start, not sure where the first half of February went, so I’ll make sure this is a good
I write today regarding a squirrelly thought: are the benefits of registering a hashtag trademark almost always outweighed by the consequences? In light of a recent Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“TTAB”) ruling and the Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure’s (“TMEP”) provisions, hashtag marks offer much less protection than traditional character-based marks,
Hawaii seems to be on the mind here at DuetsBlog lately. Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting three Hawaiian islands for the first time. While there, I quickly became acquainted with Hawaiian life and language. It’s a beautiful place; I recommend everyone visit.
When I first landed on Kauai, the “garden island,”
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.
As our loyal readers know, we love bringing non-traditional trademarks within your sights for consideration, even if they’re hanging from the ceiling, so here’s another to explore:
The
Every now and then it’s worth checking in at the USPTO to see what’s cooking in the world of non-traditional product configuration trademarks:
As it turns out, the Big Green Egg is seeking to be more than a word mark — two
– Nancy Friedman, Wordworking
A few years ago I began tracking a trend in startup naming: names that ended in -ly. Adly, Chirply, Letter.ly, Planely, Shoply, Weebly—my first list included 29 such names, some of them dot-coms and some that used the .ly domain (the Libyan country code).
My initial impression was that this was