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No matter how you feel about President Trump’s campaign promises and now his administration's actual policies, few disagree that Mr. Trump is business savvy in many things he does. Mr. Trump's branding illustrates that point the best. He gets it. Days before swearing in as the nation’s 45th president, he already came up with a slogan for his re-election campaign in 2020, “Keep America Great.” What’s more he instructs his trademark lawyer to apply to register the slogan with the U.S. Trademark Office...

... business or economic courts. But if a party to a civil case is a private citizen, not involved in business activities, the dispute must be handled by a Court of general jurisdiction. Arbitrazh courts have traditionally adjudicated disputes involving trademarks and unfair competition. Courts of general jurisdiction, like state courts in U.S., usually adjudicate small claims disputes, family law disputes and criminal cases. They rarely adjudicate trademark disputes. In refusing to take on the case ...

On March 24, 2015, the US Supreme Court handed down a long-anticipated opinion in a trademark case. It held that decisions of the US Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) may, in some cases between the same parties, have preclusive effect on likelihood of confusion issues and therefore be binding on a district court in a subsequent case: So long as the other ordinary elements of issue preclusion are met, when the usages adjudicated by the TTAB are materially the same as those...

... owners unsolicited spam email and text messages inviting them to use their services. Yelp alleges that the promises that Defendant give to its customers are false and fraudulent. The legal tools that Yelp uses to stop Defendants are noteworthy: its trademarks and breach of contract. First of all, Yelp uses its trademark rights to stop Defendants. Indeed, Revleap.me displays the Yelp logo on its home page (obviously without the permission of Yelp), along with the logos of Google Plus, TripAdvisor,...

Mr. Pink: Why can't we pick our own colors? Joe: No way, no way. Tried it once, doesn't work. You got four guys all fighting over who's gonna be Mr. Black, but they don't know each other, so nobody wants to back down. No way. I pick. You're Mr. Pink. Be thankful you're not Mr. Yellow. A dialogue from Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) It turns out Mr. [Thomas] Pink should be thankful for his last name. This is the name Victoria’s Secret wants so badly. But sorry, Victoria’s...

... now. At the very beginning of its nearly 100-page opinion, the Board was careful enough to state: “[t]his decision concerns only the statutory right to registration…. We lack statutory authority to issue rulings concerning the right to use trademarks.” In the U.S., trademark rights are based on actual use of the mark, not on a governmental decision to register the mark. (To be sure, registration grants valuable rights and presumptions. One of such rights includes the right to record ...

It is not Stoli or Russian Standard. It is Putinka vodka who sponsors the U.S. Olympic team. The Winter Olympic Games in Sochi is underway. We get overwhelmed with news and sports coverage every day. At last, we now see more sports news, much less politics around the Sochi games. This blog can’t help but write about topics that are related to advertising and brands, particularly, brands that get publicity during various sports games. (Last year we wrote about tennis star Maria Sharapova’s SUGARPOVA...