Trademark Law

The way a store or restaurant looks is often central to the success of business.  It is often also an asset of the business that can be protected as trade dress. Restaurants and stores (successful ones, at least) tend to…

.XXX domain formats are due out soon. This means that you will begin to see (or not see) porn sites moving to the format www.SITENAME.xxx around the end of the year. This new domain is intended to isolate adult websites…

Trademark searches can be informative tools.  Yesterday, Bruno Tarabichi from Trademark Sentinel wrote about the effectiveness of a client-performed trademark search.  He noted, quite rightly, that clients often choose to do their own search instead of having one professionally run….

Trade dress is the protectable dress, design, packaging, or look-and-feel of a product or service. Because trademark rights are all about use and signaling in the consumer’s mind the source of the product, nearly anything that functions as such a…

Ok, I am guilty of it.  Last week, I complained that everyone and their mother was sticking “i” in front of a word and calling it a brand, but darn’d if I can’t help but do it too – and…

I’ve written before about invention promotion scams, and when my clients file trademark applications, I always warn them about receiving official-looking documents requesting payments for various kinds of trademark registration and monitoring services.  However, to this point, the scams I…

I don’t want to see any more i-whatever names.   I am continually amazed at the number of companies, stores, and products that get branded with a leading “i.”  Apple was creative when it developed the iMac.  It carried that…

US trademark applications and registrations can be used to obtain trademark protection in other countries.  Similarly, foreign trademark applications and registrations can be the basis for a trademark application filed in the US. As a member to a number of…