LaserWash is a brand name of a brand of touchless in-bay automatic vehicle wash system, or car wash. The name LaserWash is a registered trademark of PDQ Manufacturing. LaserWash vehicle wash systems are manufactured in De Pere, Wisconsin and sold throughout North America and in over 40 countries.
The first LaserWash vehicle wash system, branded LaserWash 4000, was manufactured and sold in 1989. This was the sole in-bay automatic product line for PDQ until a second system was released in 2000, the LaserWash G5, later superseded by the "LaserWash G5-S". In 2005, the LaserWash M5 was released to be the eventual replacement for the LaserWash 4000. PDQ continues to use the LaserWash trademark worldwide today and manufactures the 7th-generation LaserWash 360 Plus and LaserWash AutoXpress. [1]
The original LaserWash trademark application at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was filed by PDQ Manufacturing, Inc of Green Bay, Wisconsin on August 29, 1994. The description provided to the USPTO was for "commercial machines used to wash motor vehicles." The original trademark was cancelled on August 7, 2002 and has been superseded by the word LASERWASH. Delaware Capital Formation, Inc in Wilmington, DE, representing PDQ Manufacturing through Dover Corporation, is the current registered owner of the LaserWash trademark. [2]
Among other global trademark registrations, in Australia, the Laserwash mark is registered by Delaware Capital Formation with IP Australia under Trademark Registration Numbers 1117150 and 1940818. [3]
LaserWash systems are able to be remotely controlled and configured over the internet via a web interface. Owners are able to see the status of the car wash and send commands to the machine. [4] At a Black Hat conference in 2017, it was shown that the web interface could be compromised and allow hackers to access the equipment at sites not properly employing external network firewalls or passwords. PDQ has since issued product bulletins and software revisions prompting users to block unauthorized access to their network, including automated routine network hygiene.
Bobcat Company is an American-based manufacturer of farm and construction equipment, part of Doosan Group of South Korea. Its American headquarters is in West Fargo, North Dakota, United States, formerly in Gwinner, North Dakota. Its European headquarters moved in 2017 from Waterloo, Belgium to Dobříš in the Czech Republic, where Bobcat operates one of its European manufacturing plants. It was a subsidiary of the Ingersoll Rand Company from 1995 until July 2007, when it was sold for US$4.9 billion to Doosan Infracore. The company sells skid steer loaders, compact excavators, side-by-sides, compact tractors, and other small hydraulic equipment under the Bobcat brand name. It is one of the few major manufacturing companies operating in North Dakota.
Kleenex is a brand name for a variety of paper-based products such as facial tissue, bathroom tissue, paper towels, tampons, and diapers. Often used informally as a genericized trademark for facial tissue in the United States, the name Kleenex is a registered trademark of Kimberly-Clark Worldwide, Inc. Kleenex products are manufactured in 30 countries and sold in more than 170 countries. Kleenex brands include Cottonelle, Huggies, and VIVA.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.
A trademark is a word, phrase, or logo that identifies the source of goods or services. Trademark law protects a business' commercial identity or brand by discouraging other businesses from adopting a name or logo that is "confusingly similar" to an existing trademark. The goal is to allow consumers to easily identify the producers of goods and services and avoid confusion.
DWG is a proprietary binary file format used for storing two- and three- dimensional design data and metadata. It is the native format for several CAD packages including DraftSight, AutoCAD, BricsCAD, IntelliCAD, Caddie and Open Design Alliance compliant applications. In addition, DWG is supported non-natively by many other CAD applications. The .bak, .dws, .dwt and .sv$ files are also DWG files.
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 patent applications and oppositions to granted patents. The term is used differently in different countries, and thus may or may not require the same legal qualifications as a general legal practitioner.
Ugg boots are a unisex style of sheepskin boot originating in Australia. The boots are typically made of twin-faced sheepskin with fleece on the inside, a tanned outer surface and a synthetic sole. The term "ugg boots" originated in Australia, initially for utilitarian footwear worn for warmth, and which were often worn by surfers during the 1960s. In the 1970s, the boots were introduced to the surf culture of the United Kingdom and the United States. Sheepskin boots became a fashion trend in the U.S. in the late 1990s and a worldwide trend in the mid-2000s. In Australia, they are worn predominantly as slippers and often associated with daggy fashion sense and bogan culture.
Laser guidance directs a robotics system to a target position by means of a laser beam. The laser guidance of a robot is accomplished by projecting a laser light, image processing and communication to improve the accuracy of guidance. The key idea is to show goal positions to the robot by laser light projection instead of communicating them numerically. This intuitive interface simplifies directing the robot while the visual feedback improves the positioning accuracy and allows for implicit localization. The guidance system may serve also as a mediator for cooperative multiple robots. Examples of proof-of-concept experiments of directing a robot by a laser pointer are shown on video. Laser guidance spans areas of robotics, computer vision, user interface, video games, communication and smart home technologies.
In the United States, a design patent is a form of legal protection granted to the ornamental design of a functional item. Design patents are a type of industrial design right. Ornamental designs of jewelry, furniture, beverage containers and computer icons are examples of objects that are covered by design patents.
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.
Dennis David Crouch is an American patent attorney who worked for McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP (MBHB) in Chicago, Illinois, until 2007. In 2007, he accepted a post of associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law in Columbia, Missouri.
A trademark examiner is an attorney employed by a government entity such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to determine whether an applicant should be permitted to receive a trademark registration, thus affording legal protection to the applicant's trademark. The job of a trademark examiner is thus to examine marks applied for to determine if they run afoul of any prohibitions on registration, such as infringing upon an existing registration of the same mark, or constituting the generic name of the goods with which the mark is associated.
Scams in intellectual property include scams in which inventors and other rights holders are lured to pay money for an apparently official registration of their intellectual property, or for professional development and promotion of their ideas, but do not receive the expected services.
The Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) is a set of initiatives for providing accelerated patent prosecution procedures by sharing information between some patent offices. It also permits each participating patent office to benefit from the work previously done by the other patent office, with the goal of reducing examination workload and improving patent quality.
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.
Q. Todd Dickinson was an Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He was an Executive Director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), and had been mentioned by some sources for possible reappointment to his former post as Director of the USPTO by the Barack Obama administration prior to the appointment of David Kappos to that post.
The Bell System was the system of companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by AT&T, that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for 100 years from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell, as it held a vertical monopoly over telecommunication products and services in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, it had assets of $150 billion and employed over one million people.
Ugg boots trademark disputes are the disputes between some footwear manufacturers, as to whether "ugg" is a protected trademark, or a generic term and thus ineligible for trademark protection. In Australia and New Zealand, where "Ugg" is a generic term for the style of footwear, 702 registered trademarks include the term "Ugg" in various logos and designs. By contrast, UGG is a registered trademark of the California-based company Deckers Outdoor Corporation in over 130 countries worldwide, including the U.S., the European Union, and China.
