Trademarking the Seven Dirty Words

With the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Brunetti case on the registration of scandalous trademarks, one might wonder whether allowing such scandalous marks will open the floodgates of registrations. My former colleague Vicenç Feliú (Nova Southeastern) wondered as well. So he looked at the trademark database to find out. One nice thing about trademarks is that all applications show up, whether granted or not, abandoned or not. He's posted a draft of his findings, called FUCT® – An Early Empirical Study of Trademark Registration of Scandalous and Immoral Marks Aftermath of the In re Brunetti Decision, on SSRN:

This article seeks to create an early empirical benchmark on registrations of marks that would have failed registration as “scandalous” or “immoral” under Lanham Act Section 2(a) before the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s In re Brunetti decision of December, 2017. The Brunetti decision followed closely behind the Supreme Court’s Matal v. Tam and put an end to examiners denying registration on the basis of Section 2(a). In Tam, the Supreme Court reasoned that Section 2(a) embodied restrictions on free speech, in the case of “disparaging” marks, which were clearly unconstitutional. The Federal circuit followed that same logic and labeled those same Section 2(a) restrictions as unconstitutional in the case of “scandalous” and “immoral” marks. Before the ink was dry in Brunetti, commentators wondered how lifting the Section 2(a) restrictions would affect the volume of registrations of marks previously made unregistrable by that same section. Predictions ran the gamut from “business as usual” to scenarios where those marks would proliferate to astronomical levels. Eleven months out from Brunetti, it is hard to say with certainty what could happen, but this study has gathered the number of registrations as of October 2018 and the early signs seem to indicate a future not much altered, despite early concerns to the contrary.

The study focuses not on the Supreme Court, but on the Federal Circuit, which already allowed Brunetti to register FUCT. Did this lead to a stampede of scandalous marks? It's hard to define such marks, so he started with a close proxy: George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words. This classic comedy bit (really, truly classic) nailed the dirty words so well that a radio station that played the bit was fined and the case wound up in the Supreme Court, which ruled that the FCC could, in fact, ban these seven words as indecent. So, this study's assumption is that the filings of these words as trademarks are the tip of the spear. That said, his findings about prior registrations of such words (with claimed dual meaning) are interesting, and show some of the problems that the court was trying to avoid in Matal v. Tam.

It turns out, not so much. No huge jump in filings or registrations after Brunetti. More interesting, I thought, was the choice of words. Turns out (thankfully, I think) that some dirty words are way more acceptable than others in terms of popularity in trademark filings. You'll have to read the paper to find out which.