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Tag: distinctiveness

Has the OREO trademark become generic?

February 23, 2016 / / Comments Off on Has the OREO trademark become generic?

Generic trademarks are no joke. Earlier this week, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board ruled that the trademark BOOKING.COM was generic for travel agency and hotel reservation services. Legally speaking, if a mark is generic, it no longer serves the purpose of a trademark and cannot be protected or enforced against third party uses. According to the TTAB’s ruling, booking.com operates to essentially identify the product itself and does not operate as a source-identifier to customers. Therefore no one is entitled to exclusive use of this term in commerce.

This news triggered a few things in my mind. Recently, a friend of mine and I had lunch at a nice restaurant in the Houston area. This restaurant offered a particular dessert offering – a dressed-up, fancy Oreo cookie.[1] Now, being a trademark nerd, I noticed the lack of any trademark designation on the menu listing. No ™. No ®. And no disclaimer in the fine print suggesting that “Oreo” is a trademark owned by someone else and licensed to this restaurant. Nothing of the sort. My friend and I joked about this for a while until it occurred to me that I may have stumbled upon something interesting:

Has OREO become a generic term that no longer functions as a trademark?

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Coca-Cola is trying to claim trademark rights to “ZERO.” Billy Corgan must be inconsolable.

December 9, 2015 / / Comments Off on Coca-Cola is trying to claim trademark rights to “ZERO.” Billy Corgan must be inconsolable.

Did you know that The Coca-Cola Company applied to register a federal trademark for the term “COCA-COLA ZERO”?  It is true.  Coca-Cola filed the application with the USPTO on March 4, 2005.[1]  The application was published for opposition on April 17, 2007.  Not surprisingly, the companies that own Dr. Pepper and 7-Up immediately opposed this registration.[2]  The battle has been ongoing for over eight years now.

Without going into too much detail, an executive for Coca-Cola testified recently that there are twelve Coke products that use the term ZERO in the product name.[3]  This includes Coke Zero, Cherry Coke Zero, Vanilla Coke Zero and others.  This is consistent with Coca-Cola’s trademark application, which identified the relevant goods and services as “Beverages, namely soft drinks; syrups and concentrates for the making of the same.”[4]  Nevertheless, the “ZERO” part of the mark almost certainly refers to the marketing of these specific products as having “zero calories” per serving size (i.e., one can or bottle).  This presents a series of interesting trademark concepts.

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