If you encounter a wine and a beer with the same brand name, would you assume that they came from the same company? Would you think your favorite winery had expanded into the beer market, or your favorite brewer had begun bottling wine as well? This is the essence of a longstanding issue in trademark law. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) tends not to allow a trademark application for beer to proceed if the same or a similar mark is registered for wine, and vice versa. Does this really make sense? And what can be done about it?
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Keep it Legal Blog
Can a Toothbrush be a Product Design Trademark?
November 18, 2014
In theory, anything that identifies the source of a product or service can be a trademark. This includes not just words and logos, but colors, sounds, and packaging (which falls under the related category of trade dress.) What about a product design trademark? Philips recently tested the boundaries of this issue with a US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) application to register the base assembly of an electric toothbrush as a trademark.
Copyright Transformative Use Issue: Where Are We Now?
November 12, 2014
I’ve written about Fair Use before (to see some of my previous posts on the topic, check out my blog’s handy new search function.) The hottest topic in fair use these days is, without question, the copyright transformative use issue. What does it mean to say the use of someone else’s copyrighted work is “transformative,” and how are the courts ruling on this topic?
Is the Look & Feel of a Website Protectable Trade Dress?
November 4, 2014
A recent case involving two online providers of maternity clothing, Ingrid & Isabel, Inc. v. Baby Be Mine, LLC, gave rise to this question: are you allowed to copy the look & feel of a competitor’s website if you don’t directly copy elements protected by copyright and trademark, such as wording and logos? To answer this question, the court had to explore the concept of trade dress, a subset of trademark law.
