The district court’s attorney fee award was reasonable and did not violate First Amendment freedom of speech. In a trademark infringement case between two civic organizations that promote political candidates in Louisiana, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed a judgment by the district court awarding over $148,000 in attorney fees. In…
The summary judgment finding by the district court which rejected an air mattress company’s theory of initial-interest confusion and the accompanying jury instruction that a likelihood of confusion must exist at the time of purchase to support a trademark infringement claim was erroneous. In a suit by bedding manufacturer Select Comfort against a competitor for…
In granting summary judgment, the district court incorrectly assumed that “actual use” of unregistered service mark requires actual sales and revenue generation. A federal district court applied an incorrect legal standard for “actual use” by plaintiff Erik M. Underwood of his unregistered service mark E.R.I.C.A., the Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver has…
A party that appeals a Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) decision to the Federal Circuit does not waive the right to challenge a subsequent TTAB decision in district court. A North Carolina district court erred in finding that it lacked jurisdiction to hear an appeal of a TTAB decision issued after remand from the…
Widow of longtime MAD artist Don Martin can go forward with mark infringement, publicity rights claims over publications that occurred within Florida’s four-year catch-all statute of limitations. The widow of MAD Magazine cartoonist Don Martin is not time-barred from pursuing trademark infringement and publicity rights claims against the publisher of MAD and DC Comics, to…
Tire maker entitled to recover on injunction bond for wrongful prohibition on sale of certain brand tires. The federal district court in Yakima, Washington, correctly ruled—on remand and in accordance with a prior instruction—that leaving a preliminary injunction in effect after trial was wrongful, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco has held. However,…
Lengthy use by the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam of its unregistered marks was not enough, by itself, to raise a triable issue as to the marks’ protectability. A church that calls itself the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (the “Unified Church”) failed to show that its asserted trademarks had acquired secondary meaning and therefore…
Use of analogous state-law limitations period for Lanham Act Section 43(a) claims was “unsatisfactory”; summary judgment order finding Bayer’s false association and false advertising claims time-barred was vacated. Reasoning that a district court erred by reading a limitations period into the Lanham Act where none existed for Section 43(a) claims, the U.S. Court of Appeals…
The TTAB acted within its discretion in weighing evidence of functionality and alternative designs. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board had sufficient evidence to find that two box designs for electric cables and wire to prevent tangling submitted by applicant Reelex Packaging Solutions, Inc. were functional and not entitled to trademark protection as trade dress,…
The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) erred by not applying the Supreme Court’s two-part Lexmark test in analyzing standing under 15 U.S.C. § 1064 but nevertheless reached the correct result because the Empresa Cubana standard used by the Board was substantially similar to Lexmark. The TTAB correctly determined that a company that owns federal registrations for SPROUTS trademarks in…
