A Practical Guide to Monitoring, Enforcement, and Brand Protection

For today’s athletes, visibility is both an opportunity and a risk. The same platforms that help build a personal brand also make it easy for others to misuse an athlete’s name, image, or likeness for their own gain. Many student‑athletes experience this when they stumble across a fake merch page, an impersonation account, or a video ad using their image without permission.

In January, there is an official celebration day known as National Beer Can Appreciation Day. That’s really a thing; it occurs once a year to celebrate January 24, 1935, the historic day when beer was first sold in cans.

It has been a week since the United States government shut down. With no agreement between Congress on a funding bill for fiscal year 2026, the United States government ceased its non-essential operations at 12:01 am on October 1, 2025.

While it may not be Halloween season, you can still be tricked by a fraudulent specimen submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The issue of fraudulent specimens in trademark applications has become a growing concern for both the USPTO and businesses. In recent years, the USPTO has observed an increase in the submission of fraudulent specimens related to trademark applications and renewal filings.

The 2024 Olympics have come to a close, and as we all look back on the memories made and records set in Paris (and Tahiti, of course!), I can’t help but focus on a commercial that irritated me to no end. The commercial promoted Google’s Gemini AI technology by featuring a proud father working with his impressionable daughter, who the ad tells us was looking up to track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The doting but modest father explains that his daughter “wants to show Sydney some love (by writing a letter), and I’m pretty good with words, but this has to be just right. So Gemini: Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is, and be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record one day.”

The Supreme Court made it clear, regardless of any intended message, the First Amendment does not permit anyone to register someone else’s name as part of a trademark. The Lanham Act, the law which governs federal registration of trademarks, (“the Act”), prohibits registration of trademarks containing the names of living individuals without their consent. In the case of Vidal v. Elster, the Court held that such a restriction is not a violation of the First Amendment.

Big business owners, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and influencers are all looking for boosts to their reputations that drive traffic and revenue their way. Using the parlance of the 2020s, they are looking to generate impressions and conversions through clever online marketing—usually leveraging the power and reach of social media platforms. Frequently this takes the form of sharing or reposting content already on social media, sometimes with a creative business-specific twist.

In early August, the nearly half a billion users of Twitter looked at their phones and found something perplexing—the instantly-recognizable blue icon with the white silhouette of a bird had vanished, and in its place a black square with a white “X” had appeared. CEO Elon Musk had decided to rebrand Twitter as “X”—but did he think through all the trademark ramifications of this choice before implementing it?

Over the past few weeks we have been watching CBS’s celebration of college basketball and, during commercial breaks, hearing those familiar musical notes that signal The Masters golf tournament has arrived. So, what better time than now to celebrate Passover, Easter, world class golf, and, naturally, a good trademark dispute.

Lil Nas X, Trademark infringement, Satan, Shoes. These may seem like four completely unrelated items chosen entirely for their randomness, and yet all four comprise pop culture’s biggest legal story of 2021 so far. Don’t worry – if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll bring you up to speed, but the short version is that a rapper, a shoe company, and the devil are involved in turning a run-of-the-mill trademark infringement case into headline-making news. The real message is that a company’s brand and trademark are defined by its willingness to aggressively defend them, and the devil isn’t always just in the details.