Welcome back to another edition of Merely Informational and Incapable Marks.
The above neighborhood Applebee’s is on my usual route to going anywhere from our home, so I’m predicting I’ve passed by well more than 10,000 times.
The temporary “Dining Room Open” signage is a recent addition from a few months ago, when Minnesota
A week ago, over at The Fashion Law, an Independent Source for Law, Business and Culture, an enjoyable trip down memory lane was published about the history of trademark protection regarding Louboutin’s red-colored sole mark.
What I hadn’t seen before now is Christian Louboutin’s quote “then it popped”:
“The concept shoe, with its
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
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
My daughter captured this striking photo on a recent trip to Times Square in New York City:
Here is my less-artsy close-up of the same advertising, to focus in on the Snapchat logo, complete with its rounded-corner square border and dot matrix surrounding the ghost shape:
What do you think, should we add the ghost
We’ve written a lot about single color trademarks here over the years. Weems, the owner of the Flexilla brand has unleashed its federally-registered chartreuse-colored non-traditional trademark for “compressed air hoses” against Plews for selling air hoses with a “bright florescent green color” — a color that Plews claims online “reduces chances of tripping
Back in 2009, we wrote about what was then Kimberly Clark’s pair of
We’ve written before on the subject of non-traditional trademarks and how look-for advertising can be quite helpful in not only educating consumers that a color or other design feature should stand out in their mind as performing the helpful role of a trademark, but in convincing the USPTO too.
Earlier this month the USPTO