According to today’s New York Times, mutual fund behemoth Vanguard is launching an ad campaign that turns “Vanguard” into a verb.
Curiously, the Times report contains nary a hint of the trademark lawyer’s common anxiety that using a mark as a verb runs the risk of causing a loss of distinctiveness and perhaps even genericide.  Google [...]

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“The president is a person, not a product,” [David Axelrod] was said to tell [Desirée Rogers].  “We shouldn’t be referring to him as a brand.”  — New York Times, 3/12/10.
Which recalls:

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Nominated for an Oscar (er, Academy Award) as a Best Animated Short, Logorama:

With apologies for the relative lateness of this post, trademark folks: Assume that the many marks on display were used without permission of their respective owners.  Discuss.
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For anyone who couldn’t make it to the domain name/online TM symposium at CWRU in the fall, the webcast is now available online.  Some additional web resources on areas associated with the symposium topics (along with speaker bios) are available on the bottom of this webpage.
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With gratitude to Eric Goldman for drawing my attention to more opportunities to blog about the Twilight franchise, the U.S. District Court in California on January 12 granted a preliminary injunction to Summit Entertainment (the movie studio that produces the Twilight movies) for copyright and trademark infringement in relation to the unauthorized activities of a [...]

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Combine the Streisand Effect and a trademark lawyer with wit and resources, and you get the South Butt’s Answer to the lawsuit filed against it by the North Face. This is Half Dome versus Half Ass, the bullying socialism of the North Face (according to the Answer) against freedom of speech and the American Dream [...]

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The following is a first cut at a list of Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law – Trademark.
For background and explanation of the Lost Classics series, read this earlier post.
(Ordered alpha by author)
Ralph S. Brown, Jr., Advertising and the Public Interest: Legal Protection of Trade Symbols, 57 Yale L.J. 1165 (1948)
Rudolf Callmann, The Law of [...]

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Some time ago on this blog, I ranted a bit about how younger IP scholars either have lost the knack of knowing something about the history of the discipline – or never acquired it in the first place.
Off and on over the last year, I assembled lists of key pieces of scholarship and key [...]

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From the Department of Joys of the Season to You, Too comes news that the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership not only owns a trademark registration for the phrase “Light Up Night” but is now — and I mean that almost literally, as in “in the middle of the holiday season” — sending out cease-and-desist letters to [...]

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I was intrigued by this item in the NYT “Ideas” report last Sunday:
Wearing imitation designer clothing or accessories can fool others — but no matter how convincing the knockoff, you never, of course, fool yourself. It’s a small but undeniable act of duplicity. Which led a trio of researchers to suspect that wearing counterfeits might [...]

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From Charbucks to South Butt …
Recent Pitt grad and my former research assistant Dan Corbett is now a Pittsburgh trademark lawyer with his own blog – Pittsburgh Trademark Lawyer, and please send some traffic his way — and via Dan I learn that the North Face has gone ahead and sued the seller of “South [...]

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Networks. In my youth, the term was most familiar to me as the word for large, national television stations. NBC was at the bottom of a small heap in the late 1970s. If I recall correctly, Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show supported most of the network in general. Now remember, there were only three [...]

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The Boise State Broncos football team is unbeaten this year and ranked in the top 10.  But the university scored off the field the other day:  Broncos 1, the rest of the sporting world zero.
What’s the big win?  Boise State received a trademark registration for the color blue in connection with “Entertainment services, namely, the [...]

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In case anyone missed it, Glenn Beck unsurprisingly was unsuccessful in a WIPO arbitration proceeding seeking transfer of the domain name:
“http://glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com/”
An amusing account of the decision and the aftermath is available here.
(Thanks to my student Carolyn Blake for passing this along to me.)
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With thanks to my colleague Cassandra Robertson for bring this article in yesterday’s NY Times to my attention.  The article describes ongoing battles between the FTC and Experian to have Experian stop using the “freecreditreport.com” domain name for credit monitoring services that are not, in fact, free.  What interested me in particular about the article [...]

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In case anyone is going to be in or around Cleveland on November 12-13 (and needs a break after the hiring conference!), we are hosting a symposium on trademark and domain name issues in cyberspace with a terrific group of speakers.  Keynotes to be provided by Daniel Gervais (Vanderbilt) who will be speaking on geographic [...]

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Apparently Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series, started writing a version of the series from a different character’s (Edward’s) point of view and the early, incomplete draft was leaked onto the Internet. Jacqui Lipton’s post about Stephenie Meyer’s “reaction to the unauthorized release” of her partial draft reveals another way to think about [...]

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As I have noted often in the past, IP law sometimes echoes Dr. Seuss. Do we have One Thing or Two Things? Things matter, again. I’m catching up with a district court case from earlier this month, in which the court wrestled with the following argument:
A cell phone is sold to a [...]

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D is for Digital is over now. I urge anyone interested in the Google Book Deal (aka the Google Book Search) to check out the schedule page and the webcast links (the stream links are at the top of the Friday and Saturday schedules respectively). James Grimmelmann put together a conference that aired out pro [...]

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Some things never change.  Or do they?
Today’s NYT Magazine notes a “cult” of American consumers obsessed with “Mexican Coke” – Coke produced with cane sugar, rather than with corn syrup.
The Wall Street Journal had the same story more than three years ago, and the WSJ did it better.  Maybe there’s a relationship between paywalls and [...]

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