In Battle Over Band Name, Supreme Court Considers Free Speech And Trademarks; NPR, 1/18/17

Nina Totenberg, NPR; 

In Battle Over Band Name, Supreme Court Considers Free Speech And Trademarks

""Vagueness means that a law doesn't give enough instruction to citizens on how to follow the law," Shapiro says. "What is disparaging? It depends on the particular trademark examiner you get, or the particular judge."

Tushnet replies that in a program with 500,000 applications for trademark registration each year, there will inevitably be some inconsistencies, just as there are in the judgments made under the other parts of the law. In each case, she observes, if you get turned down for a trademark registration, you can appeal within the agency. If you lose there, you can go to court.

But she adds that the trademark registration system has served the nation well.

"It's a complex system, and if you pull out a chunk of it without extreme care, you're going to upset the rest of the system."

And that, she says, could put the whole trademark system in jeopardy."

SCOTUS To Hear From Band The Slants For Right To Trademark Name; Here & Now, WBUR, 1/17/17

Here & Now, WBUR; 

SCOTUS To Hear From Band The Slants For Right To Trademark Name

"The Asian-American band The Slants will appear before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to argue for full trademark rights to their name, which is a pejorative.

The Portland band has won its case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, in which the court ruled that the Patent and Trademark Office and the Department of Justice is infringing on the group's rights to freedom of speech.

Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Rebecca Tushnet (@rtushnet), professor of law at Georgetown Law School, about the conflict for rights to the name."

Tito's Tacos to change name following trademark tangle; Brattleboro Reformer, 10/3/16

Robert Audette, Brattleboro Reformer; Tito's Tacos to change name following trademark tangle:

"Victoroff requested that the Reformer "immediately remove the aforementioned infringing material from its website, immediately notify the source of the infringing content of this notice, inform them of their duty to remove the infringing material immediately, and notify them to cease any further posting of infringing material to The Brattleboro Reformer News website in the future."

The Reformer has declined to take down the picture on First Amendment grounds.

In a response, Fredric D. Rutberg, the president of New England Newspapers Inc., which owns the Reformer, refused to remove the picture from the Reformer's website.

"The photo in question depicts a local food vendor whose sign identifies his business as Tito's Tacos," wrote Rutberg. "While this use of the name Tito's Tacos may indeed infringe on your client's registered trademark, it is our opinion that the photo in question does not constitute an infringement of your client's trademark. At best it is a 'fair use' of trademarked material."

"Tito's greatly respects your newspaper's First Amendment rights of free speech," Victoroff responded in an email to Rutberg, "but the use of its trademarked name in the [photo and news story] seriously dilutes and erodes its trademark. ... Every day the Tito's Tacos family must defend and protect its trademark rights from death by 1,000 cuts or risk losing its name and trademark.""