This is quite a collection of art pieces, inspired by some pretty recognizable candy bar brands:
The fine print reads: “Each handmade . . . sculpture is a real working whistle!” Parodies, anyone?
Here’s a question, does the functionality of these pieces make them any less expressive as art, any more likely to be
A recent Mall of America and Nordstrom shopping trip (with visiting extended family), coupled with some initial moments of admitted boredom, led me to wandering through the shoe department:
Let’s just say, the stroll through the shoe department made it all worthwhile, to capture the above image, showing Louboutin’s latest fashion sense, leading to my
These lime green building sites caught my eye and jogged my trademark memory. First, the future home of the University of Iowa College of Pharmacy, at beam signing, on May 4, 2018:
Second, the expansion of the Metro Transit headquarters near downtown Minneapolis, on June 12:
Of course, the obviously common element of
A couple of years ago, our friend John Welch over at the TTABlog reported about a white color trademark that had acquired distinctiveness, according to a rare precedential TTAB decision:
No, that’s not a roll of toilet paper, it’s a preformed gunpowder charge for use in muzzleloading rifles. And the applied-for mark
Last year we took a whiff of Hasbro’s application to register the smell of its Play-Doh® for “toy modeling compounds.” We didn’t think the application was ripe for a functionality refusal, but a refusal on the ground of a lack of acquired distinctiveness seemed like a certainty.
An Office Action issued on May 26th
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
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
Back in December we wrote about a trademark infringement case (Weems v. Plews) involving claimed exclusive rights in the color chartreuse as applied to various kinds of hoses.
Since then, Plews has been busy trying to short circuit the case and have the unregistered (common law) trademark infringement claims dismissed, contending Weems did not adequately
As we have discussed previously, trademark protection isn’t an exclusive club for words and pictures. Shapes, sounds, and even the tactile feel of a product can all qualify for trademark protection. And as a recent application from Hasbro shows, even the smell of a trademark might qualify for trademark protection.
The mark set
Love the simplicity and honesty of this sign, captured on vacation, in a cozy crepe spot (had to get out of my chair and walk across the dining room to read the smaller print, well worth the steps):
As Seth recently noted, there can be room for improvement when it comes to making signs