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Court Finds "Pinning" On the Internet To Be Fair Use (docketalarm.com)
speedplane writes: Pinterest has always aggressively defended their trademarks, but in 2013, they launched a trademark lawsuit against Pintrips, a travel planning startup that allows users to "pin" and share information about flights. Yesterday, however, a federal court issued a major ruling against Pinterest finding that "pinning" is a feature, not a trademark, and therefore is fair use. This seems to bode well for the many other "pinning" sites on the internet.
How is "pinning" any different from any other type of hyperlink?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Setting aside whether trademarks actually advance anything but the lawyers' wallets, Pinterest should have simply focused on "Pintrips", and complained about the similar name of the site, instead. That probably would have got them somewhere.
This has nothing to do with patents. This has to do with trademarks. There is no requirement that a trademark be original or novel. Simply that the owner is the earliest to make continuous use of a distinctive symbol (logo, word, color, sound, etc.) as a source identifier for a good or service (and for a federal trademark, use them in interstate commerce).
If you have priority in the mark, then others cannot use a mark in a way that causes a likelihood of confusion in the relevant public. The coding and implementation of your product has nothing to do with it. The brand identify and consumers' interest in ensuring that there are not a dozen different counterfeit Nike businesses selling athletic shoes has everything to do with it.
The surest way to have your opinions dismissed out of hand as irrelevant babblry is to demonstrate that you have literally no idea what sort of property is involved, what the legal standards are, and how it the rights are used in the real world. You've hit the trifecta.
Meanwhile, Windows declared Open Source.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You should probably spend a little time reading and understanding the law (or possibly English) before spouting random words. Patents are not mentioned anywhere in the summary.
Does anyone else find it ironic that a site that is all about grabbing content from others (that may or may not actually own the content to begin with) going to court to defend a copyright on a standard english word?
Incorrect. If you abandon use of a trademark for a sufficient period of time, anyone else can come along and adopt the same trademark for the same goods or services. The statutory presumption (Federal law) is abandonment after non-use for 3 years.
There are instances where a famous mark with residual goodwill, repair service activity, etc. has been deemed to still belong to the original owner even after more than 10 years of non-use, but those are exceptions based on odd circumstances (e.g. Ferrari trademarks for particular models of cars).
For an example of an entirely unoriginal trademark, see the Love beverage trademark dispute.
Note that I did not say first use. I said earliest continuous use. I meant that.
Pintrips and PInterest do seem at least similar enough that I could imagine some people assume they're related. Granted, we'd be getting pretty close to the "moron in a hurry" which seems to be the test, but I don't think we're quite at that level.
I'm pretty sure it's a verb...
Good point. Plus, it gets to the heart of what trademarks are for - unique and reliable identification of a business or brand. Had the article not been how I learned about Pintrips, then based on the name I would have assumed Pinterest expanded their business. Especially if the sites looked similar.
There was no updated information. It was clearly stated in the summary and linked decision. It was necessary to be a dick because my 6 year old has better reading comprehension, and it was a blatant topic-jack to bitch about his personal peeve instead of the subject at hand.
Not sure why Pinterest even tried with this case.
My guess is they tried this case because pin-trips sounds an awful lot like pin-terest (pin-trist). My guess is that they thought they had a good chance of winning the first and were hoping that they could get a more general ruling that gave them full control of the word "pin". Basically, they lost because they got greedy. If they just went after pintrips because it was one letter sound away from their trademark pintrist -> pintrips they probably would have won.