Generic descriptive words (such as, say, “restaurant”) are not supposed to be subject to trademark registration. But what about “Hofbrau,” a word that is generic and descriptive in a foreign language? [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
Generic descriptive words (such as, say, “restaurant”) are not supposed to be subject to trademark registration. But what about “Hofbrau,” a word that is generic and descriptive in a foreign language? [Timothy Geigner, TechDirt]
3 Comments
I find the inconsistent use of umlauts in the article a bit irritating. But that’s just the German in me.
Why can’t both trademarks exist in parallel based on separate geographies (ala the home page of scrabble.com)?
I took a class in intellectual property law many years ago where the professor claimed that Godfather’s Pizza was at the time unable to expand into Utah (at least under that name) because there was an Italian restaurant in Utah called The Godfather. (GP later expanded into Utah after the other restaurant closed.) Why isn’t the Hofbrau case like that situation?
This is amusing, to say the least. Back in my undergrad days at Fordham College, at Rose Hill in the Bronx, one of the most frequently visited watering holes in those days was the “Hofbrau” on 86th St, Manhattan, and it had been there for years before then as a landmark for its steins of beer. As I graduated from Fordham in 1954, simple math says that was over 60 years ago. And before the dries among readers get their knickers knotted, it should be noted the legal drinking age in NY was 18 until 1971, so no blue nose laws were broken.