Apple acquired partial European trademark rights to the word "lightning" from motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson's intellectual property unit, H-D Michigan, LLC, according to public filings with the European Union's trademark and design unit (see below), and a blog post by Patently Apple. Apple uses the term Lightning to describe its proprietary…
Articles Posted in Trademark
After three years, language-learning software company Rosetta Stone settled its trademark lawsuit against Google over the company's Adwords advertising program. (read the settlement below). The litigation rollercoastered during that time. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted Google's motion to dismiss Rosetta Stone's lawsuit on August…
Facebook, online advertising agency adSage, and a web-based wholesaler of Chinese goods are named as defendants in a new class-action trademark lawsuit accusing them of enabling the placement of, or placing ads for, counterfeit NFL apparel on the social network. (read it below) Inkies Sports, Inc. d/b/a Krystal's NFL Shoppe, a New…
For several months, Facebook has reportedly been developing and testing a “Want” button, to supplement its ubiquitous “Like” button. Just last week, Facebook announced that several companies will be testing the new “Want” button and showed what the button would look like. On October 12, shortly after the release of…
Last Tuesday, The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) upheld a decision to deny Apple’s trademark application to register its music feature mark that’s used on iPhones and other Apple products. The reason? The mark was confusingly similar to another mark that’s now owned by MySpace. Both marks consist of two musical eighth…
Pinterest filed a complaint at the end of August in the Northern District of California against Qian Jin of Nanjing, China, for cyberpiracy, trademark infringement and false designation of origin, trademark dilution, and unfair competition. Specifically, Pinterest claims that Qian purchased dozens of “infringing” domain names that are nearly identical and…
Mary Cesar, the owner of Mary’s Cakes & Pastries in Northport, Alabama, received a cease-and-desist letter last week from Collegiate Licensing Company (CLC) ordering her to stop selling products decorated with the University of Alabama’s trademarks and logos. Specifically, the letter stated she must stop using, “trademarks, names, logos, colors,…
On July 19th, Rick Quereshi filed a Notice of Opposition against Twitter’s application for the mark TWEET. Although Twitter applied for trademark protection of TWEET back on April 16, 2009, and the application was published for opposition later that year, Quereshi opposes the registration for the following reasons: 1) Twitter…
Zynga, the online game maker of multimillion-dollar blockbuster games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and Words with Friends, sued French gaming company Kobojo today for trademark infringement over the company's Pyramidville game (see it below). At issue are Zynga's trademark claims to all games ending with ville, the French word for…
Watch out, Facebook users. Mark Zuckerberg's social network giant recently modified the company's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (i.e., Terms of Service ['TOS']) to now allege that Facebook claims trademark rights to the word 'Book.' (Read it below) Oh, and in case you forgot, Facebook also claims intellectual property rights…