Recent Developments in Trademarks
Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, Canady, Falk and Rabkin, San Francisco
by Karen S. Frank
I. SCOPE OF RIGHTS
a. Personal Names
Flynn v. AK Peters Ltd., 377 F.3d 13 (1st Cir. 2004).
For a personal name to be eligible for trademark protection, a
plaintiff must demonstrate that such name has acquired secondary
meaning for the customers in the relevant market for the products
or services associated with such name.
Plaintiff, a co-author of a book on robotics, failed to show that the
wider group of consumers that might purchase a revised version of
the book would do so based on her name being affixed to the
revision, of which she did not fully approve. The First Circuit
affirmed the district court’s summary judgment ruling, holding that
the Lanham Act did not apply to plaintiff’s claim, as anecdotal
evidence that a “handful of strangers” recognized her from a talk
and one graduate student said she was “famous” did not constitute
sufficient evidence of her name having acquired secondary
meaning.
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