On April 18, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu followed through with his previously stated intention to sue Oakland because officials plan to rename its airport. Chiu filed the legal complaint in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San...
Nespresso filed a trademark infringement lawsuit 2022 alleging that Peet's Coffee had mimicked Nespresso's trademarked coffee cartridges. A subsidiary of Nestle, Nespresso manufactures and sells coffee cartridges and the machines that use them. Peet's is a...
Popular grocery store chain Trader Joe's has filed a trademark lawsuit against a cryptocurrency platform operating as "Trader Joe." The retailer alleges that the decentralized exchange (DEX) platform deliberately uses the name in reference to the 50-year-old...
Post Consumer Brands is long known for its line of cereals, including Grape-Nuts, Shredded Wheat, and Raisin Bran. It recently launched a new line of just-add-water single-serving products to complement its conventional multi-serving box packaging. It chose to call it...
The craft beer community is often collegial based on the “us against them” paradigm. In this case, “us” is the small independent breweries that have popped up by the thousands across the United States, and “them” is Miller, Budweiser and a handful of other large...
On April 23, the U.S. Supreme Court said that the federal Lanham Act does not require that a trademark infringer did so willfully as a precondition to the trademark owner getting back the profits the infringing party made in violation of the Act. At the time the...
On April 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a trademark decision holding that a multi-color pattern on product packaging can be inherently distinctive and that this inherent distinctiveness does not require a “peripheral shape or border”...
The Lanham Act (federal trademark law) does not allow generic terms to be registered as trademarks, but it does allow protection for words that are considered merely “descriptive.” Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell where the line is. Can you take a generic word...
If you’re opening a Mexican restaurant, you don’t call it “Jenny’s.” You choose a name that carries cultural cachet and implies what you’re selling. When a Phoenix-area restaurant opened selling Asian-Mexican fusion cuisine, it hoped to capture both cultures with its...
Earlier this year, President Trump signed an executive order calling for crackdown on counterfeit or pirated goods. Specifically, it targeted U.S. companies that import, or who facilitate the import of, those goods. Now, a bipartisan bill has passed the House of...
