Podcast: The Briefing by the IP Law Blog - Prince Estate Wants Winery's 'Purple Rain' Trademark Back in the Bottle
The Briefing by the IP Law Blog: Prince Estate Wants Winery's 'Purple Rain' Trademark Back in the Bottle
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - False and Misleading Advertising, Label Review
Registering and protecting a trademark involves more than just filing paperwork. Many businesses make costly errors that could lead to rejection, enforcement issues, or even the loss of rights. Here are some of the most...more
Registering a trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provides significant legal benefits, including nationwide protection and the presumption of ownership. Federal registration is a smart investment for...more
The Court ruled that the post-sale context can be relevant when establishing similarity between trade marks....more
A recent precedential decision enlarges the protection for foreign trademark owners. Plumrose Holding Ltd. v. USA Ham LLC, Opposition No. 91272970 (January 17, 2025). The decision is a nod to foreign trademark owners to...more
On April 1, 2025, long-awaited amendments to Canada’s Trademarks Act and Trademarks Regulations will come into force. The purpose of the amendments is to discourage abuse of Canada’s trademarks regime and to improve the...more
Joining a series of precedential decisions about descriptiveness, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board recently affirmed a refusal to register Sheet Pile, LLC’s (“Applicant”) mark ZPILE on the Principal Register, on the...more
In business, trademarks are everything. It's how consumers come to know, love and trust your brand. It's a valuable corporate asset, and many disputes can arise of name rights with the explosion of e-commerce and the...more
The U.S. Supreme Court’s end-of-term decision in Abitron v. Hetronic seems to have created more questions than answers about U.S. brand owners’ ability to leverage the federal Lanham Act in global trademark disputes. In the...more
U.S. businesses selling abroad cannot enforce domestic trademarks against foreign entities selling infringing goods into the United States through strawmen, according to a recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in...more
On March 21, the United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc. over whether the infringement provisions of the United States Trademark Act impose liability for...more
In a precedential decision, the Trademark Trial & Appeal Board (Board) granted two opposers’ motions for partial judgment on their claim of false suggestion of a connection under Section 2(a) of the Trademark Act based on a...more
In a recent precedential1 opinion, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board affirmed the refusal to register Jasmin Larian, LLC’s handbag design mark for “handbags” in Class 18, on the grounds...more
Thank you for reading the July 2022 issue of Sterne Kessler's MarkIt to Market® newsletter. This month, we discuss a recent precedential TTAB decision regarding product configuration marks. We also highlight recent...more
In this week’s episode of The Briefing by the IP Law Blog, Scott Hervey and Josh Escovedo discuss a legal dispute between the Prince estate and an Ohio-based winery over the rights to the trademark “Purple Rain.”...more
Anna Jarvis led the efforts to establish the first official celebration of Mother’s Day in 1908, during which she honored her own mother, Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis, a Civil War-era social activist. But about a dozen years after...more
In a non-precedential decision in In re French Meadow Organic Bakery LLC, Serial No 86243820 (February 4 2016), the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) held that HEALTHY HEMP was merely descriptive of “bakery goods;...more
In a ruling bound to please 15 year-old boys everywhere, the USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“TTAB”) reversed the Examining Attorney’s refusal to register the trademark NUT SACK DOUBLE BROWN ALE (in standard character...more
Recently, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (the “TTAB”) held that an unsuccessful opposer was precluded from later pursuing a cancellation against the same trademark owner, even though the opposer assumed a different...more
On June 18, 2014, in Amanda Blackhorse et al. v. Pro-Football, Inc., Cancellation No. 92046185 (TTAB 6/18/2014), the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board (TTAB) cancelled six trademark registrations issued between 1967 and 1990...more