#USPTO issued trademark guidelines following Booking.com decision

Since the decision by SCOTUS on the Booking.com case, many registrants of generic domain names have applied to register marks.

These marks contain the fully qualifying domain, including the TLD. We keep track of these applications, and report on them.

With all these applications pending, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has released new guidelines for the trademark application examiners.

The guidelines document reads, in part:

“To establish that a generic.com term is generic and incapable of serving as a source indicator, the examining attorney must show that the relevant consumers would understand the primary significance of the term, as a whole, to be the name of the class or category of the goods and/or services identified in the application.”

Evidence of consumer perception may include “dictionaries, usage by consumers and competitors, use in the trade, and any other source of evidence bearing on how consumers perceive a term’s meaning.”

Many thanks to attorney Jason Schaeffer of ESQwire.com for bringing this to out attention.

You can also view a great video from NamesCon Online that discusses the subject.

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