Trade dress is the characteristics of the visual appearance of a product or its packaging that signify the source of the product to consumers. Trade dress is an aspect of trademark law, which is a form of intellectual property protection law.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alexandria, Virginia, after a 2005 move from the Crystal City area of neighboring Arlington, Virginia.
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.Tooltip Public Law 79–489, 60 Stat. 427, enacted July 5, 1946, codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1051 et seq. is the primary federal trademark statute in the United States. In other words, the Act is the primary statutory foundation of United States trademark law at the federal level. The Act prohibits a number of activities, including trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and false advertising.
In the United States, a design patent is a form of legal protection granted to the ornamental design of an article of manufacture. 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 United States is considered to have the most favorable legal regime for inventors and patent owners in the world. Under United States law, a patent is a right granted to the inventor of a (1) process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, (2) that is new, useful, and non-obvious. A patent is the right to exclude others, for a limited time from profiting of a patented technology without the consent of the patent-holder. Specifically, it is the right to exclude others from: making, using, selling, offering for sale, importing, inducing others to infringe, applying for an FDA approval, and/or offering a product specially adapted for practice of the patent.
Canadian trademark law provides protection to marks by statute under the Trademarks 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 trademark under the Act or can alternately be protected by a common law action in passing off.
The Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984 is a United States federal law that amended the federal criminal code to make it a federal offense to violate the Lanham Act by the intentional use of a counterfeit trademark or the unauthorized use of a counterfeit trademark. The act established penalties of up to five years imprisonment and/or a $250,000 fine for selling or attempting to sell counterfeit goods or services. It increased such penalties for a second or subsequent conviction under the Act.
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 United States trademark law, the Supplemental Register is the secondary register of trademarks maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. It was established in 1946 by Subchapter II of the Lanham Act, to allow the domestic registration of trademarks that do not meet all the requirements for registration on the Principal Register, so that the holder(s) of such a mark could register it in another country. This was necessary because under the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property foreign registration was not permitted in the absence of domestic registration, and the trademark laws of countries outside the U.S. often have less stringent registration requirements for marks.
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 that identifies a product or service from a particular source and distinguishes it from others. A 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. Trademarks used to identify services are sometimes called service marks.
The trademark symbol™ is a symbol to indicate that the preceding mark is a trademark, specifically an unregistered trademark. It complements the registered trademark symbol ® which is reserved for trademarks registered with an appropriate government agency.
Richard P. Minsky is an American scholar of bookbinding and a book artist. He is the founder of the Center for Book Arts in New York City.
Trademark infringement is a violation of the exclusive rights attached to a trademark without the authorization of the trademark owner or any licensees. Infringement may occur when one party, the "infringer", uses a trademark which is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark owned by another party, especially in relation to products or services which are identical or similar to the products or services which the registration covers. An owner of a trademark may commence civil legal proceedings against a party which infringes its registered trademark. In the United States, the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984 criminalized the intentional trade in counterfeit goods and services.
In Canada, passing off is both a common law tort and a statutory cause of action under the Canadian Trade-marks Act referring to the deceptive representation or marketing of goods or services by competitors in a manner that confuses consumers. The law of passing off protects the goodwill of businesses by preventing competitors from passing off their goods as those of another.
Indian trademark law statutorily protects trademarks as per the Trademark Act, 1999 and also under the common law remedy of passing off. Statutory protection of trademark is administered by the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, a government agency that reports to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP), under the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
The Washington Redskins trademark dispute was a legal effort by Native Americans to define the term "redskin" to be an offensive and pejorative racial slur to deprive the owners of the NFL's Washington Redskins of the ability to maintain federal trademark protection for the name. These efforts had 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 withdrew 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.
Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. 218 (2017) is a Supreme Court of the United States case that affirmed unanimously the judgment of the United States 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.
Design is a form of intellectual property right concerned with the visual appearance of articles which have commercial or industrial use. The visual form of the product is what is protected rather than the product itself. The visual features protected are the shape, configuration, pattern or ornamentation. A design infringement is where a person infringes a registered design during the period of registration. The definition of a design infringement differs in each jurisdiction but typically encompasses the purported use and make of the design, as well as if the design is imported or sold during registration. To understand if a person has infringed the monopoly of the registered design, the design is assessed under each jurisdiction's provisions. The infringement is of the visual appearance of the manufactured product rather than the function of the product, which is covered under patents. Often infringement decisions are more focused on the similarities between the two designs, rather than the differences.
