Trademarks Go Green

World Intellectual Property Day is April 26, just over a month away. This year's theme is green innovation. The environment and climate change have become major political and public opinion issues in the over last few years. Companies and advertisers have certainly noticed this trend and are keen to link their products and services with environmentally friendly values. More and more products are being branded as "green". You can see this trend in trademark filings. As the chart below shows, the number of US and Canadian trademark applications filed for marks containing the word GREEN increased dramatically in the last few years. In 2007 alone, the number of filings increased in the US 131 percent and in Canada 88 percent.
















Data source: USPTO and CIPO trademark databases, March 20, 2009.

Tupperware Patents

The U.S. economy may be sputtering, consumer confidence is tanking, and food and energy prices are at all-time highs. But there's one company that sees a silver lining in all this gloomy news. Tupperware, the 62-year old company famous for its plastic food storage products, knows that when times are bad, it's sales go up. People still have to eat, after all, and they need a safe way to store their leftovers.

Earl S. Tupper (1907-1983), the company's founder and namesake, had patented several small inventions (comb case, shoe heel) before he found success in plastic containers. On October 5, 1946 he filed four design patent applications for a sugar bowl (D156855), pitcher (D154348) and pitcher covers (D158155 and D156854), which were issued between 1949-1950. A year later, a paint can lid inspired him to design an air-tight container for food. In 1954, Tupper received his first patent for container specifically designed for food (2695645).

Tupperware has received thousands of patents (mostly design patents) on food storage, preparation and serving products. In 1969, Tupperware was sold to Rexall Drugs, which later became Dart Industries. All Tupperware patents since the early 1970s have been assigned to Dart. Both Tupperware and Dart are now based in Orlando, Florida.

Fictional Brands

Last Sunday's Toronto Star had an interesting story about fictional brands from film and literature that have inspired real-life products. Some examples include HOLIDAY INN hotels, said to have been inspired by the 1942 Bing Crosby movie of the same name, and BRAWNDO energy drink, a fake brand from Mike Judge's 2006 film Idiocracy. There's even a term describing this phenomena: "defictionalization".

Infringement = Triple Word Score

An AP story reports that Hasbro and Mattel, makers of Scrabble(R), are unhappy with an unauthorized online version of the game called Scrabulous. The companies, which share worldwide rights to the boardgame, have sent cease-and-desist letters to the two brothers from India who created the online version which is very popular on Facebook.

According to the official Scrabble(R) website, the first version of the game, called Lexico, was invented in 1931 by an unemployed architect named Alfred Mosher Butts. Unfortunately, his repeated attempts in the 1930s to secure a patent on the game and license it to Parker Brothers and Milton Bradley all ended in failure. In the mid-1940s, James and Helen Brunot of Newtown, Conn., who had acquired one of Butts' homemade sets, entered into a partnership with Butts to market a redesigned, simpler version of the game. The trademark Scrabble was registered on December 16, 1948. (Reg. 524,505) The Brunots patented an improvement to the game in 1956. (US2,752,158)

Hasbro owns the Scrabble trademarks and copyrights in North America; Mattel in the rest of the world.

Baby Products, Patent Numbers and a Puzzle

My wife and I are going to be new parents any day now, so our house has been filling up with all kinds of cool baby-related products. (We're having twins, so that means two of everything.) Of course, I can't resist examing all these amazing products for patent numbers. One product that piqued my interest was a rubber diaper fastener called the Snappi. It's a rubber T-shaped cord with plastic teeth that's supposed to be safer than safety pins. I thought it looked like a trap for miniature beavers, but it worked well enough in practice trials on Winnie-the-Pooh.

The back of the Snappi label had a patent application number that looked odd to me. It said "Pat. Appl. 2005/01115". U.S. published application (aka PGPubs) have publication numbers in the format "YYYY/nnnnnnnn", so I went to the USPTO website and keyed in 20050001115. No luck. US 2005/0001115 is an application for a collapsible dishwashing stand. I then tried searching it as an application number in both the USPTO and esp@cenet databases. Again no luck. It didn't look like a Canadian, European or Japanese patent number, so I was quickly becoming stumped. Pooh was too busy admiring his first-class diaper job to offer any helpful advice.

Luckily, the Snappi label also carried the number of a registered trademark, 1,773,066. I switched over to the USPTO trademark database and quickly retrieved the trademark registration for SNAPPI, owned by Snappi Holdings of Pretoria, South Africa. Searching Snappi as the assignee in the USPTO patent database then led me to inventor Hendrik Visser and his patent on a "Diaper or babies napkin fastener", (5,077,868) and two design patents (D321,673 and D320,575) for diaper fasteners invented by Japie Crafford. All three patents closely resemble our Snappi fasteners, but I never did find a patent document numbered 2005/01115. Visser has several other patents and patent applications for related products.

I did notice that the three U.S. patents listed South African applications as priority documents, and the numbers were in a "YY/nnnn" format. So my best guess was that "2005/01115" is a new South Africa application filed by Snappi. It might be too recent to have been loaded in the esp@cenet database (if it's even been published). As I slumped back into my chair, it occured to me that patent numbers are not always as straightforward as you might think.