Keep it Legal Blog

In October 2021, Facebook announced that it was changing the name of their company to “Meta”. Conflicts have already started to pop up around the brand name. It’s hard to imagine Facebook just assumed that a reasonably common four-letter word was fully available and nobody was using it in connection with related goods or services. Did they fail to do their due diligence, or do they just not care?       The key issue at the moment, in the U.S. at least, is the prior pending United States Patent and Trademark Office trademark application for META for “Computers, laptops…

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What does it mean when someone asks me to “trademark” a brand for them? First, of course, you need to know what a “trademark” is (for a review, check out my page What Is A Trademark?). Basically, it’s anything that identifies you or your company as the source of goods and services. Common trademarks include brand names, business names, logos, and taglines. Typically, when someone reaches out to me to assist with trademark protection, what they’re thinking about is filing an application to register their mark as a trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. From my perspective…

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Why is the United States Patent and Trademark Office taking so long to respond to trademark filings? The USPTO’s goal is for new trademark applications to be reviewed within 2.5-4.5 months after the date of filing. I’ve practiced trademark law for 17 years, and for most of that time they have been reasonably good at hitting that target. However, per their Trademarks Dashboard, the currently wait time for initial review of trademarks is 6 months, and I’ve seen some applications wait for review for longer than that. What’s the delay all about? As of June 2021, according to the USPTO,…

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