IP Law Bulletin

The doctrine of “initial interest confusion,” scorned by many legal commentators and rejected by numerous courts, is alive and well in the Ninth Circuit, as evidenced by its recent usage by a watch manufacturer to overcome a summary judgment motion by online retailer Amazon. The initial interest confusion doctrine holds that a defendant can be deemed liable where a plaintiff can demonstrate that consumers are likely to be confused by a defendant’s conduct at the time of the consumers’ initial interest in a product or service, even if that initial confusion is corrected prior to an actual purchase. The doctrine is prevalent in so-called “keywords” cases in which one company pays the proprietor of an Internet search engine (e.g., Google) to prominently display the paying company’s website(s) in Internet searches conducted by consumers that include keywords such as a competitor’s company name or products. Alternatively, in the present case, the proprietor of the searchable website uses particular keywords associated with one company or product to drive consumer traffic to a similar product offering.

Summary: Recently the United States Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) considered the implications of competing filings that occurred on the same day. In particular, a trademark applicant filed an express abandonment of its trademark application, and, later that same day, a third party filed an opposition against the trademark application. While the TTAB agreed with the applicant and both dismissed the opposition without prejudice and allowed the application to be abandoned without prejudice, the timing of the filings played no role in reaching this decision. To the contrary, the TTAB stated that it “shall not take cognizance of fractions of a day” and assumed that the parties’ opposition and express abandonment filed on the same day were filed at the same instant. What impact did the decisions being “without prejudice” as opposed to “with prejudice” have on the parties though?

Summary: It is rare that legal decisions are reported on by “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” but that is exactly what happened when the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia affirmed the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s decision to cancel six trademark registrations owned by Pro-Football, Inc., which does business as The Washington Redskins.  The marks were canceled on the basis that the marks “may disparage” a “substantial composite” of Native Americans.  However, does a ruling based on these grounds fly in the face of the First Amendment?  An upcoming decision by an en banc Federal Circuit may soon tell us when it determines whether an Asian-American band is allowed to register the trademark “THE SLANTS” for entertainment in the nature of live performances by a musical band.