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…
Retailer allegedly created knockoff goods and acted as more than a hands-off intermediary. Australia-based online retailer Redbubble, Inc., could be directly liable for third-party sellers’ infringement of trademarks owned by the Ohio State University, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has held. Unlike online retailers or auction houses that typically had been found not…
NIKE no longer had a legally cognizable interest in the validity of the preliminary injunction. NIKE, Inc., was precluded from appealing a district court’s preliminary injunction issued in November 2019 barring the athletic footwear giant from using the phrase “Sport Changes Everything” in an advertising campaign, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond has ruled….
Genuine issues of material fact existed regarding whether the plaintiff’s electronic system for managing brokerage accounts contained protectable trade secrets. Trade secrets misappropriation claims brought by InteliClear, LLC, under the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) and the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act (CUTSA) against ETC Global Holdings have been reinstated by the U.S. Court…
The applied-for mark NORTH 61 was properly refused because it produced a similar commercial impression to the mark 66° NORTH when both were used for apparel and retail services. The proposed mark NORTH 61 was confusingly similar to the registered mark 66° NORTH, the Federal Circuit has held, affirming a decision of the Trademark Trial…
