8 ms·
Trademarks are comprised of existing fonts all the time.
by 1shooner 3y ago
Trademarks are comprised of existing fonts all the time.
- wolrah 3y agoI think the "single letter" part is important here. AFAIK trademarks can't be too simple and generic. Sort of like how Intel couldn't trademark 286/386/486, so instead of 586 we got Pentium.
- throwaway09223 3y agoNo, it's not important. It's just wrong, as clearly illustrated by the article we're all discussing. Microsoft applied for, and obtained, a trademark for "x". Companies do this all the time. Companies also trademark numbers all the time. Dale Earnhardt trademarked the number "1": https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_... Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures. It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.
- nashashmi 3y agoAre you sure it is the letter and not the graphic that is trademarked?
- zimpenfish 3y agoIt does say "Standard Character Claim: No" which (as best I can tell from [1]) means it is the particular form of that letter[2], not the letter itself, which is trademarked. [1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mean-trademark-59226.html https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mea... [2] Although it is a pretty generic "1".
- TehCorwiz 3y agoThe specimen on that application are clearly more than just the numeral ‘1’. There’s obviously design there. This does not appear to be equivalent.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sokoloff 3y agoI thought that Peugeot had a trademark on car models of the form X0Y (where X and Y were single digits), resulting in the Porsche 901 being renamed to the 911 that we now know.
- Kuinox 3y agoApple trademark the word Apple.
- realusername 3y agoIn this case the entire logo previously exists though. I'm not sure similar cases exist but it's similar as using an old public domain logo as your own. Would that be enforceable?
- ben_w 3y agoNow I'm curious where the original Apple logo came from… (And now I know: designed by Ron Wayne, so not public domain at all; and I'd forgotten about the ribbons with the text) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Apple_Inc.#/media/File:Apple_first_logo.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Apple_Inc.#/media...
- jameshart 3y agoOf course you can. 3M, Scotch, Crate & Barrel, Lufthansa and Jeep all have legitimate trademarked word marks that consist of nothing more than their name written in Helvetica.
- freejazz 3y agoThat's a word mark... it doesn't matter what font it's in because the mark relates to the words, not a specific design of the words in display...
- jameshart 3y agoThe word mark registers the word as a trademark. The typographical and design treatment of the word can have separate trademark protection. That can be true whether or not a design mark is registered. If you started a car company called ‘Beep’ and write its name in olive green Helvetica Black, Jeep might struggle to make a case about your name’s similarity to their word mark (beep is a different word and rhyming is not a crime), but they for sure could take you to court for stealing their trade dress.
- freejazz 3y agoSo rather than make the point that the use in helvetica is captured in the word mark (it isn't) you instead add trade dress into this??