Intellectual Property Law

Seattle Law Professor Takes on AT&T and the PTO's Registration of Signal Bar Design

By Michael Atkins

UW School of Law Professor Sean O’Connor, guest blogging at Legal Satyricon, writes about AT&T’s trademark registration of the bars indicating cell phone signal strength (depicted left).

“The bars are purely functional representations of the strength of cell service and a standardized one at that,” he writes. “If anything were unworthy of being captured as a trademark, this should have been it.

To his dismay, AT&T’s bold use of “SM” to indicate its claim to common law rights in the design last year was replaced with an even bolder ”®” to indicate its federal registration, albeit on the Supplemental Register.

“While I am aghast at the chutzpah of the attorneys who sought to register a blatantly functional, generic icon as a proprietary trademark, I reserve my highest scorn for the PTO.”

A spirited discussion follows the post. Nice debut, Sean!

Full post as published by Seattle Trademark Lawyer on July 15, 2009 (boomark / email).