In Brief:  If you intend to get your trademarks back after a transfer, be sure that’s what your documents say.

In Brief: Trademarks that co-exist for a long time don’t always create a likelihood of confusion.

In Brief:  Use of a licensed trademark is limited by the scope of the license.

In Brief:  Using someone else’s descriptive trademark can be fair use.

In Brief:  A trademark has to meet minimum standards of creativity for a copyright registration.

In Brief:   An emoji trademark wasn’t used in commerce.

For the Mother Cluckers trademark saga, we need a little background about goodwill. A trademark establishes a connection between the owner’s goods and services and the consumer. That connection is the goodwill in the trademark. In order to be effective, a trademark assignment requires the assignment of the goodwill attached to it. 

Assigning goodwill along with the assignment of a trademark isn’t form over substance.

Molson Coors Beverage Company sells a hard seltzer called Vizzy. Future Proof Brands, LLC sells a hard seltzer called Brizzy. Future Proof sued Coors for trademark infringement alleging that Vizzy is likely to cause confusion with Brizzy.  

Even when two product names sound similar, a likelihood of confusion isn’t automatic.

The US Supreme Court won’t be weighing in on some interesting cases in the world of IP. Here are just a few of them by topic:
Copy

• rights in Fictional Characters
• Right to Challenge Patents
• Trademarks

Most people are familiar with Apple Inc. and its apple logo. Apple Inc. and its products are ubiquitous and pervasive. At any time, a person can be wearing one of their watches, talking on one of their phones and watching a video on one of their tablets.

PrePear is a new app that allows the user to save and organize recipes, create meal plans, shop efficiently for food and prepare healthy foods. PrePear adopted a pear logo, which makes sense considering the pun in the name. When PrePear sought to register its pear logo as a trademark, USPTO’s Examining Attorney didn’t see a likelihood of confusion between the pear logo and any other logo. The Examining Attorney cleared the application for publication.

Then, Apple filed an opposition.