Items tagged with Trademark
We are living in the heyday of retro gaming today. You have many current (and future) options to play all of the games that defined your childhood (or adulthood) on miniature versions of the original consoles. Nintendo started the "mini console" segment with the Nintendo Classic Edition and later followed that up with the SNES Classic Edition. Sony has stepped into the retro segment with its recently announced PlayStation Classic packing 20 games and style almost identical to the original, albeit on a smaller scale. Nintendo has been good for one classic edition console per calendar year with last year's offering being the SNES Classic Edition. A new EU filing hints that Nintendo is preparing...
Read more...
Nintendo's stock may have taken a beating of late but the company still has some of the coolest hardware and games on the market. One of the big successes for Nintendo has been the small retro consoles that it has been reissuing for nostalgic gamers to enjoy like the NES Classic Edition that recently came back in stock. Gamers wondering what the next retro goody might be from Nintendo will be glad to hear that a GameCube classic is a possibility according to a new rumor. Nintendo has filed for three separate trademarks that all have to do with the GameCube in Japan. The trademarks are for game software and video game hardware. None of the trademarks relate to merchandising. The trio of new trademarks...
Read more...
A court in Beijing has ruled in favor of Facebook in an ongoing trademark dispute with Zhongshan Pearl River Drinks, a Chinese beverage company that registered the term "face book" in 2011. Even though Facebook objected, China's Trademark Review and Adjudication Board ended up approving the "face book" trademark in 2014.Facebook was none too pleased with the trademark authority's decision, and after getting nowhere with the agency, the social network took the matter up with the Beijin court. The court sided with Facebook in its original lawsuit. Zhongshan filed an appeal, but in its most recent ruling, the Beijing court upheld the ruling.It seems like a cut and dry case, though part of Zhongshan's...
Read more...
And now we cannot even trust critics and reviewers! Jay Gentile, a man based in California who is said to be the operator of a number of sites that sell 4-star and 5-star reviews to Amazon sellers (among them buyazonreviews.com and buyreviewsnow.com) is the target of a lawsuit filed by Amazon in an effort by the mega-retailer to crack down on fake reviews. Other "John Does" also believed to be involved in such practices are alluded to in the suit as well. Filed Wednesday in King County Superior Court in Washington state, the Amazon lawsuit accuses Gentile and the John Does of trademark infringement, false advertising and violations of the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act and the Washington...
Read more...
Ok, Google: We see what you’re going for by trying to trademark the word “Glass” and its stylish font. “Google Glass” is a mouthful and is actually a bit of a tongue-twister, like “law blog” or “rural juror”, so using that name as a trademark isn’t ideal. “Glass” just sounds better. The problem is that the U.S. Patent And Trademark Office is holding things up. A trademark examiner had some issues with Google’s attempt to secure the term “Glass”, including potential confusion with existing trademarked terms in the computing market (“Write on glass”, “Glass3d”, and “Teleglass”...
Read more...
This week the USPTO gave Apple another tool in its endless battle against copycats: a trademark for the layout of its Apple Store. That’s right, the store that made fools of early critics and became one of Apple’s many success stories now has a trademark to protect such design elements as the “oblong table with stools located at the back of the store.” Given the trouble Apple has had with copycats in China, it’s not surprising that the company is looking for ways to prevent similar issues in the U.S. Even so, the trademark is going to seem like overkill to many people. Apple lists several features of the store in its mark description. The storefront (which, despite...
Read more...
We're big fans of full contact Football and, up through the 1980s, Basketball could be considered a contact sport until the NBA decided that that league's multimillion dollar Basketball stars shouldn't be so much as sneezed on when driving to the basket (seriously, is the NBA really more entertaining without these kind of hard fouls?). But full contact Bingo? That's a new one to us, though not to Electronic Arts, which apparently decided to file trademark applications for the term earlier this month. EA submitted two separate applications for Full Contact Bingo (serial numbers 85560267 and 85560275), one that applies to "Entertainment services, namely, providing an on-line computer game;...
Read more...
Apple may have bitten off more than it cares to chew when it purchased the iPad trademark from Taiwan's Proview Technology for a mere $55,000 back in 2006. There's now a dispute over whether Apple was granted permission to use the trademark in mainland China. Proview says that was never part of the deal, Apple says it was, and the former is suing the latter for 10 billion yuan in damages and an apology. That works out to about $1.6 billion, plus whatever an apology is worth. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Proview chairman Yang Rongshan called Apple's iPad a "great product," but that doesn't excuse Apple allegedly infringing on his company's trademark. "We've been negotiating with...
Read more...
Apple has given up on trying to trademark the term "POD" in Canada, the site Patently Apple said on Monday. PA added in the comments below the story that it feels that the abandonment of the trademark quest in Canada is just a reflection of Apple abandoning the quest worldwide. Apple first filed the trademark application in July 29, 2004. The Canadian IP Office said that the trademark was abandoned on April 13, 2011. PA showed off a long list of responses by Apple to the Canadian IP office, in an attempt to appease the office, but to no avail. To be clear, this does not affect Apple's iPod trademark. It should put a halt to such things as suing a company over something called the Profit Pod (in...
Read more...
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office isn't shy about issuing patents for just about anything. Some of the more bizarre ones include a patent for a beerbrella, a chin putter, a tricycle lawnmower, dog nose art, and even an apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force (we're not making any of this up, folks). So in the grand scheme of things, we can't really say we're surprised Apple was able to patent the phrase, "There's an App for That." First filed back on December 4, 2009, there's now a patent for that catch-phrase. Other than "good grief," there really isn't a whole lot more to say about it, but for those of you wondering, here are the two classes the patent was filed...
Read more...
Nice try. In July Twitter wrote that it was trying to trademark "Tweet." Not for the reason you might think, though: the request has been provisionally denied on the grounds that other companies had filed for trademarks of very similar words.You might think that "Tweet" was a generic term, and that would be the reason for the denial, but the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) cited other trademark applications by the firms TweetMarks, Cotweet and Tweetphoto, and said there was a "likelihood of confusion."In his blog post announcing that Twitter was attempting to trademark "Tweet," founder Biz Stone said he wasn't concerned with other firms, such as the above, who are using Tweet in their...
Read more...
In the strangest trademark application we've seen since Fark tried to trademark NSFW, Futuremark is attempting to trademark PWNAGE.If it is approved, Futuremark's request will cover an extremely wide slice of the digital entertainment market, including (but not limited to) the following:"Computer game software for communication devices; computer game software and computer game programs enabling users to play games with mobile phones and personal digital assistants; computer software and programs enabling users to communication devices to simultaneously access databases and global computer networks; software enabling transfer of data between mobile communication apparatus..."If Futuremark can...
Read more...
Don't get too excited yet, but Nintendo and Sony might want to start looking over their shoulders. On Feb. 5th, Apple applied to extend its trademark protection to gaming devices. Now what might that mean, eh?The trademark filing seeks to extend the "APPLE" (text) trademark to cover a wide swath of the gaming world, to wit:"Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games."While it would seem this...
Read more...
Well this did not take long at all. Right on the heals of Tuesday's big Apple announcement for their version of the iPhone, the BBC is now reporting that Cisco will be filling suit soon for trademark infringement. Cisco has in fact owned the iPhone name since 2000 when it acquired the name from Infogear who had originally trademarked it in 1996. Cisco, which has owned the trademark since 2000, said it thought Apple would agree to a final document and public statement regarding the trademark. "Cisco entered into negotiations with Apple in good faith after Apple repeatedly asked permission to use Cisco's iPhone name," said Mark...
Read more...
Magma(R) Design Automation Inc. announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) will reexamine U.S. Patent No. 6,725,438 (the'438 patent), one of three patents at issue in a lawsuit between Magma and Synopsys Inc. pending in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. With this decision, the PTO is now in the process of reexamining two of the three patents in the lawsuit, and the PTO will soon decide whether it will reexamine the third. The PTO is reexamining U.S. Patent Number 6,378,114 (the '114 patent), and in August rejected all 15 claims in that patent. The PTO was asked to reexamine the third patent, U.S. Patent Number 6,453,446 (the '446...
Read more...
