Friday fatuities

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If you can remember the Swinging Sixties and are alive to tell the tale, are you a relevant consumer for the purposes of US trade mark law? The IPKat thanks John L. Welch (TTABlog) for this story of how the lovely Twiggy successfully opposed an application to register TWIGGY as a trade mark for children's clothing, among other goods. The IPKat liked this bit best:

Respondent lamely argued that people who knew of Twiggy in the 1967-1970 time period are too old to buy children's clothing, and there is "no evidence that 'a new generation of adult consumers' would be aware of the model Twiggy. The Board tore that argument to shreds, noting, inter alia, that grandmothers still buy children's clothing, and that "fathers may purchase clothing for their children, and they do not have the biological issues that women do".

The IPKat thanks his new friend James Duffett-Smith (Fox Interactive Media) for this item on the settlement of a digital vinyl dispute between Stanton Electronics and Native Instruments. Native released a statement last Friday saying that they had not only settled a US civil action patent case over their use of digital vinyl in the Traktor Scratch professional DJ system but had agreed to license the technology from N2IT Holdings, the US patent owners for digital DJing. The legal and business bits of this news item are not of timelessly monumental significance, but the photo sent DJ IPKat into ecstasy. Merpel comments, better to have the IPKat in ecstasy than Ecstasy in the IPKat ...