Tag Archives: Dilution

With some cases, you just shake your head.  In this case, a restaurant purveyor thought it would be okay to open a restaurant by the name of the “Krusty Krab.”  For those of you who have no reason to have been watching cartoons for the past 20 years, this is the name of the restaurant in which SpongeBob SquarePants works, flipping crabby patties as a fry cook. … More

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, known to most as simply Beyoncé, and as “Bey” to those who like to pretend they know her, is about as famous as one can be.  She transitioned from the acclaimed group “Destiny’s Child” to become one of the biggest pop stars in the world.  Number one hits, Grammy Awards, sold-out tours, and even a reasonably successful film career are firmly under her fashionable belt.… More

Last week, Judge William Quarles of the District of Maryland issued an injunction preventing Maryland Republican State Senator Steve Hershey from using his own campaign literature. The case was brought by the Hershey Chocolate Company, which alleged that the Senator’s campaign poster and other materials infringed the famous confectioner’s trade dress. The lawsuit must have come as no surprise to Senator Hershey because, prior to this,… More

Readers of this blog might remember our previous coverage of the 2010 trademark dispute between The North Face Apparel Corp. and The South Butt, LLC. The defendants in that case adopted the trademark THE SOUTH BUTT for clothing that resembled the style of clothing sold under the well-known mark THE NORTH FACE. According to the Complaint, South Butt repeatedly attempted to register THE SOUTH BUTT as a trademark and offered to sell its business to The North Face for $1 million.… More

In an ad run initially during the post-game show of the 2010 Super Bowl, Hyundai encouraged viewers to re-think “luxury” and as a result consider buying a Sonata. The ad, which can be viewed on YouTube here, juxtaposed images of “luxury” with everyday settings: policemen eating caviar, middle class houses with giant yachts parked next door, and — in what turned out to be a step too far —… More

Yesterday the University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Penn Intellectual Property Group (PIPG) held its annual symposium, which this year focused on fashion law. David Nimmer, of copyright treatise fame, delivered the keynote, entitled “Copyright and the Fall Line.” However, despite the light-hearted topic and big-name headliner, the event was probably most notable for the apparent absence of a late-invited guest, Michael Pantalony, in-house counsel at Louis Vuitton.

Pantalony set the blogosphere atwitter a few weeks ago by sending a sternly-worded cease and desist letter to the law school’s dean complaining about the artwork on the poster advertising the event,… More

Stating that the antidilution law should be used as “a scalpel, not a battle axe,” Judge Laura Taylor Swain of the Southern District of New York once again found that Starbucks failed to prove that the famous STARBUCKS trademark was likely to be diluted by the use of the marks CHARBUCKS BLEND, MR. CHARBUCKS, and MISTER CHARBUCKS on dark roasted coffee. In her December 23 opinion,… More

As reported recently, Facebook has dropped its suit against Lamebook, the subject of our prior blog entry, pursuant to a settlement agreement. This followed Facebook’s unsuccessful attempt to have the case transferred to its home turf in the Northern District of California.

According to the news report, Lamebook got to keep its name as part of the settlement,… More

Lamebook, LLC operates a website, www.lamebook.com, at which people can submit amusing (or merely “lame”) messages and photos appearing on facebook.com – its tag line is “the funniest and lamest of facebook.” (Warning: some of the content is funny or lame mainly because it is off-color.) The editors screen the submissions and remove identifying information before displaying them on the site in various categories (such as “TypOHs”),… More

In a lawsuit that has grabbed the attention of the trademark community, The North Face Apparel Corp. sued The South Butt, LLC, its founder (college student Jimmy Winkelmann), and a pharmacy that sold allegedly infringing goods for using the mark THE SOUTH BUTT on clothing that resembled the style of clothing sold under the well-known mark THE NORTH FACE. According to the Complaint (PDF), South Butt repeatedly attempted to register THE SOUTH BUTT as a trademark and offered to sell its business to North Face for $1 million.… More