By Blake Brittain
(Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday ordered the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to reconsider its decision to deny an application for a trademark covering the obscenity word “fuck.”
In a split 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the USPTO failed to provide clear reasoning for denying the application by streetwear designer Erik Brunetti.
Brunetti won a separate trademark covering the word “Fuct” in a 2019 Supreme Court decision that struck down the USPTO’s ban on “immoral” or “scandalous” marks.
Brunetti and his attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Federal Circuit’s decision on Tuesday. A spokesperson for the USPTO declined to comment.
Brunetti applied for trademarks covering the obscenity in 2019 for use on sunglasses, watches, backpacks, and other consumer goods. The USPTO found in 2022 that the word, an “all-purpose” term and “arguably one of the most expressive words in the English language,” could not function as a trademark identifying Brunetti as the source of the goods.
Trademarks are meant to protect things that identify sources of goods in the marketplace, such as brand names, logos, and slogans. A trademark in this case would have given Brunetti the sole right to use “Fuck” to brand the products he wanted his mark to cover.
The Federal Circuit said the dispute differed from Brunetti’s Supreme Court case because the USPTO’s decision was not based on the fact that the mark was obscene. But the court agreed with Brunetti that the USPTO had registered other all-purpose words as trademarks, such as “Love,” and said the agency “failed to provide sufficient precision in its rationale for why some commonplace words can serve as a mark, but others, such as FUCK, cannot.”
In a dissenting opinion, U.S. Circuit Judge Alan Lourie said that “anyone living in today’s society of degraded language can readily tell that the f-word does not indicate the source of the proposed trademarked goods.”
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by David Bario and Rod Nickel)
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