Trademark

Trademarks (and service marks) identify the source of products and services, while trade names are short hand references to businesses. Some company names are, indeed, used as trademarks; that is, they identify the product or service of the owners.  Two that come to mind are Coca-cola® and Microsoft®.  Proper trademark usage requires placing your mark […]

You’ve expended time, money, blood, sweat and tears branding your products and services.  You are finally ready to take the next logical step, setting up a web site to establish your presence on the Internet.  You set about to register your trademark as a domain name and you find that a trademark pirate has beaten […]

This week Apple Computer, Inc. (Apple) released a bevy of new products including a newly designed, multi-touch mouse, monikered “Magic Mouse“.  Interestingly, Apple just recently lost a trademark dispute with Man & Machine, Inc. (Man & Machine) over the “Mighty Mouse” trademark, which happened to be the mark used for Apple’s previous mouse product introduced […]

Real Trademarks Used in Virtual Worlds – Part II In our June 2009 newsletter, we wrote about the challenges posed by Virtual Worlds such as Second Life to trademark owners.  The commercialization of virtual worlds by real life companies and the apparently rampant unauthorized use of trademarks by virtual world residents has created new “territory” […]

By now, anybody in the know who uses Facebook, is scrambling (or has scrambled) to get their own vanity user name. On Saturday, June 13, 2009, Facebook opened the door for an estimated 200 million users to select any “username” they wanted virtually without limitation.  The benefit is to have a URL which reads “Facebook.com/UserName,” […]

Real Trademarks Used in Virtual Worlds, Second Life In a lawsuit filed in April 2009, Taser International, Inc.,  the world’s largest maker of stun guns sued Linden Research Inc. (“Linden Lab”), the San Francisco based company, which runs Second Life, the online virtual world.  Taser Int’l, Inc. v. Linden Research, Inc., 2:09-cf-00811-ROS (D. Az 2009). […]

Lawyers often talk about the benefits of federal trademark registration.  Federal registration bestows upon the trademark owner the ability to bring infringement actions in federal court, it provides evidentiary presumptions about use and validity of the mark, it bestows a presumption of incontestability (after 5 years), it provides constructive notice that the mark is yours, […]