The Trademark Reporter's 2025 "Annual Review" of U.S. Trademark Cases

The Trademark Reporter has published its latest "Annual Review" of U.S. Trademark Cases: "The Seventy-Seventh Year of Administration of the Lanham Act of 1946," by Theodore H. Davis, Jr. and yours truly, John L. Welch. [download pdf here].

In his introduction, Ted Davis observes that the Supreme Court "delivered the final installments of two separate twenty-first century trilogies of opinions interpreting the Lanham Act." The very recent decision in Dewberry Group v. Dewberry Engineers Inc. completed a trifecta with Romag Fasteners, Inc. v. Fossil, Inc. and Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, Inc., addressing the remedy of an accounting of a defendant’s profits under Section 35(a) of the Lanham Act. In the other trilogy, two decisions found unconstitutional certain provisions of Section 2(a) - Matal v. Tam [disparagement], and Iancu v. Brunetti [scandalousness] - while the third, Vidal v. Elster, rejected a bid that the "names clause" of Section 2(c) is unconstitutional. In this writer's opinion, this latter trio of decisions has generated a number of articles, webinars, and symposia wholly disproportionate to their importance to the daily practice of trademark law. In any case, kudos to Ted for pointing out the Court's "numerous cringeworthy uses of 'trademark' as a verb" in the Elster opinion. On the TTAB side of things, perhaps the most interesting case involved the CAFC's reversal of the Board's ruling in Chutter, Inc. v. Great Concepts, LLC that had found fraud based on a recklessly false Section 15 incontestability declaration. On remand, the miscreant escaped with a mere slap on the wrist, the only consequence for its bad behavior being an order that the Office withdraw its Notice of Acceptance of the declaration - apparently leaving the door open for the filing of a new Section 15 declaration once the dust has cleared.

TTABlogger comment: Once again I thank The Trademark Reporter for granting leave to provide a link to this issue, which is Copyright © 2025 the International Trademark Association and reprinted with the permission of The Trademark Reporter®, 115 TMR No. 1 (January-February 2025).

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Text Copyright John L. Welch 2025.