Trademark

Subscribe to Trademark via RSS

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued guidance on how it will treat applications to register “generic.com” terms in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 30, 2020 decision in United States Patent and Trademark Office v. Booking.com.

We previously wrote about the Supreme Court’s Booking.com decision, which affirmed the Fourth Circuit’s decision that the mark BOOKING.COM was registrable and not generic. The Supreme Court’s decision tracked the arguments in an amicus brief we submitted on behalf of consumer perception specialists and academics from leading U.S. universities.

It is generally understood that trademark law protects against a third party’s use of your mark or a confusingly similar mark to mislead consumers into thinking goods manufactured by someone else were made by your company. But what happens if those goods were in fact made by your company, but you didn’t authorize their sale?  The Eastern District of New York recently answered one version of that question in granting Hallmark summary judgment on its trademark infringement and trademark dilution claims against defendant Dickens, where Dickens obtained twenty trailers of Hallmark greeting cards and related paper products that were intended for destruction, and began to sell them for resale to the public.