Trade dress is a legal term of art that generally refers to characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging that signify the source of the product to consumers. Trade dress is a form of intellectual property.
Band-Aid is a brand of adhesive bandages distributed by the American pharmaceutical and medical-devices company Johnson & Johnson. Invented in 1920, the brand has become a generic term for adhesive bandages in the United States and Australia.
A trademark is a word, phrase, or logo that identifies the source of goods or services. Trademark law protects a business' commercial identity or brand by discouraging other businesses from adopting a name or logo that is "confusingly similar" to an existing trademark. The goal is to allow consumers to easily identify the producers of goods and services and avoid confusion.
The Lanham (Trademark) Act (Pub.L. 79–489, 60 Stat. 427, enacted July 5, 1946, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1051 et seq. is the primary federal trademark statute of law in the United States. The Act prohibits a number of activities, including trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and false advertising.
A patent attorney is an attorney who has the specialized qualifications necessary for representing clients in obtaining patents and acting in all matters and procedures relating to patent law and practice, such as filing an opposition. The term is used differently in different countries, and thus may or may not require the same legal qualifications as a general legal practitioner.
A trademark attorney or trade mark attorney or agent is a person who is qualified to act in matters involving trademark law and practice and provide legal advice on trade mark and design matters.
The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) is a body within the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) responsible for hearing and deciding certain kinds of cases involving trademarks. These include appeals from decisions by USPTO Examiners denying registration of marks, and opposition proceedings filed against trademark applications. TTAB panels hear hundreds of claims each year asserting that trademarks should not be registered because they are generic, disparaging, or confusingly similar to existing marks. Such challenges to registration are initially considered by trademark examining attorneys, whose judgment may be appealed to the TTAB. Decisions of the TTAB may, in turn, be appealed to a United States district court, or the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Canadian trademark law provides protection to marks by statute under the Trade-marks Act and also at common law. Trademark law provides protection for distinctive marks, certification marks, distinguishing guises, and proposed marks against those who appropriate the goodwill of the mark or create confusion between different vendors' goods or services. A mark can be protected either as a registered trade-mark under the Act or can alternately be protected by a common law action in passing off.
A concurrent use registration, in United States trademark law, is a federal trademark registration of the same trademark to two or more unrelated parties, with each party having a registration limited to a distinct geographic area. Such a registration is achieved by filing a concurrent use application and then prevailing in a concurrent use proceeding before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ("TTAB"), which is a judicial body within the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO"). A concurrent use application may be filed with respect to a trademark which is already registered or otherwise in use by another party, but may be allowed to go forward based on the assertion that the existing use can co-exist with the new registration without causing consumer confusion.
In the United States, an Office action is a document written by an examiner in a patent or trademark examination procedure and mailed to an applicant for a patent or trademark. The expression is used in many jurisdictions.
The copyright status of the content of patent applications and patents may vary from one legal system to another. Whether scientific literature can be freely copied for the purpose of patent prosecution is also a matter for discussion.
In United States trademark law, the Principal Register is the primary register of trademarks maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It is governed by Subchapter I of the Lanham Act.
Trademark distinctiveness is an important concept in the law governing trademarks and service marks. A trademark may be eligible for registration, or registrable, if it performs the essential trademark function, and has distinctive character. Registrability can be understood as a continuum, with "inherently distinctive" marks at one end, "generic" and "descriptive" marks with no distinctive character at the other end, and "suggestive" and "arbitrary" marks lying between these two points. "Descriptive" marks must acquire distinctiveness through secondary meaning—consumers have come to recognize the mark as a source indicator—to be protectable. "Generic" terms are used to refer to the product or service itself and cannot be used as trademarks.
A trademark is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression which identifies products or services of a particular source from those of others, although trademarks used to identify services are usually called service marks. The trademark owner can be an individual, business organization, or any legal entity. A trademark may be located on a package, a label, a voucher, or on the product itself. For the sake of corporate identity, trademarks are often displayed on company buildings. It is legally recognized as a type of intellectual property.
An unregistered or common law trademark is an enforceable mark created by a business or individual to signify or distinguish a product or service. A common law or unregistered trademark is legally different from a registered trademark granted by statute.
The Washington Redskins trademark dispute was a legal effort by Native Americans to define the term "redskin" to be an offensive and disparaging racial slur to prevent the owners of the Washington Redskins football team from being able to maintain federal trademark protection for this name. These efforts have primarily been carried forward in two cases brought before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). While prevailing in the most recent case in which the trademarks were cancelled, petitioners have withdrawn for further litigation now that the legal issue has become moot due to a decision in another case which found the relevant portion of the trademark law to be an unconstitutional infringement on freedom of speech.
Lens.com, Inc. v. 1-800 Contacts, Inc., 686 F.3d 1376, is a decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit which ruled that when software merely acts as a "conduit" for providing services over the internet, and does not have an independent value per se, it does not constitute a "good" being "sold or transported in commerce" for the purposes of establishing whether or not a trademark for "computer software" has been "abandoned" under 15 U.S.C. § 1064 and 15 U.S.C. § 1127
Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. ___ (2017), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court affirmed unanimously the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that the provisions of the Lanham Act prohibiting registration of trademarks that may "disparage" persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols with the United States Patent and Trademark Office violated the First Amendment.
Registration of intellectual property in Ghana is key to safeguarding one's intellectual efforts from infringement. Intellectual property law of Ghana encompasses intellectual property (IP) laws in Ghana, such as laws governing copyright, patent, trademark, industrial design rights, and unfair competition. The main intellectual property laws in Ghana include the Copyright Act, 2005, the Patents Act, 2003, the Trademarks Act, 2004, the Industrial Designs Act, 2003 and the Protection Against Unfair Competition Act, 2000. These are supplemented by regulations passed by the Legislature to augment the rate of development under IP laws.
Iancu v. Brunetti, No. 18–302, 588 U.S. ___ (2019), is a United States Supreme Court case related to the registration of trademarks under the Lanham Act. The case seeks to determine if refusal to grant "scandalous" trademarks under the Lanham Act is unconstitutional under the freedom of speech clause in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Court ruled in June 2019 that the restrictions of "immoral" or "scandalous" trademarks defined by the Lanham Act is unconstitutional as it permits the United States Patent & Trademark Office to engage in viewpoint discrimination, violating the First Amendment.
