In anticipation of our visit to Chicago next week for the Intellectual Property Owners Association’s Annual Meeting, we took a tour through the USPTO’s trademark database in search of Chicago-themed trademarks. Among marks consisting of the word CHICAGO and no other words, we found quite a few gems, including some whose histories illustrate interesting trademark issues. Unsurprisingly, many of these marks have faced resistance on the basis that they lack distinctiveness because they merely describe the geographic origin of the goods or services they seek to identify,… More