An athlete’s name, image, and likeness (“NIL”) are part of his or her brand. An athlete’s name, image, and likeness are all valuable assets. Professional athletes often protect their NIL, and now, as a result of the House v. NCAA settlement, student athletes can do the same.  

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.

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.

The purpose of a trademark is to provide your business with a unique identifier on which to build your brand. Trademarks then help you to stand out in the marketplace. It’s only fitting, therefore, that one of the key elements of trademark infringement under the Lanham Act, also known as the Trademark Act, is the likelihood that consumers would be confused by a mark that is similar in some way to the potentially-infringed trademark.

A well-known truism of trademark law is that if the owner of a trademark is not making adequate ongoing use of that trademark, the owner of the mark is at risk of jeopardizing the continued right to enforce the trademark to prevent others from using the same or a similar mark in a related line of business.

Your employment attorney has been advising you that you need to audit your independent contractors and overtime-exempt employees to comply with new rules, while your accountant has been working with you to help avoid audits by the IRS. The word “audit” might as well be spelled with four letters. We all know that “audit” is a loaded term, striking fear in the hearts of battle-scarred survivors of audits gone by. There’s one more audit that you probably haven’t heard much about, however, and this one is vital in the ceaseless march to build and protect your brand: The intellectual property audit.