Mancinelli & Associates Intellectual Property Law
“Where the offense is, let the great axe fall.” — Claudius in Hamlet.
Here’s a recent situation where a family-owned business failed to do some due diligence, chose to adopt their family name as their brand name and trademark, and in the end created an offense that brought down the axe — a story of two wineries in “The Blair Family vs. The Blair Family.”
Continue reading “Family Names & Trademarks — Family-Owned Winery Loses Its Brand and Name”
The subject of this article could be filed in the category of “dumb criminals.” And here’s why.
In 2015, David Ryan Buchard of Merced, California, was already under investigation by the US Postal Inspector and a special agent for Homeland 
Security Investigation (“HSI”) for suspicion of drug dealing. They believed that Buchard was doing his transactions on a dark web drug marketplace known as The Silk Road. They were trying to track Buchard’s Bitcoin transactions on The Silk Road. Bitcoin is a form of digital money technically known as “crypto-currency,” as opposed to “fiat-currency” (i.e., money created and regulated by governments). Crypto-currencies, including Bitcoin, are legal for private transactions, but are very often used by drug traffickers because the users’ real identities are cloaked by pseudonyms.
Continue reading “Dark Web Drug Dealer’s Trademark Application Gets Him Nailed”
Too often businesses, in conceiving their brand names and the marks/logos that represent their brands, adopt really weak marks that can have disastrous consequences. In the case at hand, a restaurant chain adopted as its service mark a Spanish/Portuguese word that literally means “grilled meat” in English. As it turned out, it seems that “grilled meat” means nothing more than “grilled meat” rather than a brand name for the restaurant’s services.
Continue reading “Is Your Brand Generic? — When Grilled Meat Means Just Grilled Meat”