Explanatory introduction to a virtual guest post by Ed Timberlake:
I say if it's yours and you post in on an embeddable platform, you've given permission to the world to use it. Period.
— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) January 15, 2020
Thus, once again, I am stealing Ed Timberlake tweets to create the blog post he thinks he won’t write for me as a guest blogger here, even though he actually is doing that anyway on Twitter. And them’s the breaks!
First you think Ed’s asking a great USPTO trademark registration question about protocols used in application specimens — and, as you see, he is. The issues he attacks, looking at this thread in the most straightforward fashion, are these: (1) trademarks that “exist” in three dimensions, and (2) what dotted lines do or don’t mean on an application to register a trademark with the PTO. Read and learn:
query:
— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) January 16, 2020
do #trademarks registrations provide meaningful notice when it's unclear what the mark is (or even whether the mark exists in two, or three, dimensions)?
Work through the thread. It displays great technical mastery, and it’s original and insightful regarding the philosophy of, or perhaps in, trademarks and trademark practice that he reveals on Twitter almost every day. Don’t try to play multi-dimensional 4-D trademark chess with Ed Timberlake!
But I may be forgiven, perhaps — yes, I am that hammer that sees certain things as nails only — in observing from the introductory sentence of this tweet at the top of the thread that this is one microblog by Ed in an ongoing series: The t-shirt as ultimate non-functioning garbagio good:
what was registered this week as indicating the source of t-shirts?https://t.co/bY38BEKuDj#trademarks pic.twitter.com/wDZHYTw6qO
— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) January 16, 2020
This is an ongoing theme Ed has been developing for a while:
T-shirt registered today@uspto
— Trademarks Are Magic (@TimberlakeLaw) September 26, 2017
"as a secondary source indicator
of entertainment services"@phish https://t.co/KHg08ujO5B#trademarks pic.twitter.com/40BshE2aRw
I think it's important to see how the photo is used on the t-shirt to get a sense of how it's perceived as a trademark, and not ornamental:https://t.co/ZiwNpWdbgg pic.twitter.com/wbCbUSdjx0
— (((Mark Jaffe))) Trademark. Copyright. Different. (@MarkJKings) November 27, 2019
There are more. Ultimately, our friend Tyler Hall nails it in this response to an Ed T-shirt tweet:
Counter-counterpoint:
— Tyler Hall (@WinslowTHall) February 24, 2018
People say
“trademark”
when they mean
something I put on a t-shirt
in an attempt to monopolize it
…
and that doesn’t function.
Nailed it to a T.
Originally posted 2020-01-16 10:29:38. Republished by Blog Post Promoter