Too Small," saying the federal trademark office did not violate the First Amendment when it declined to register the mark."Our courts have long recognised that trademarks containing names may be restricted. And these name restrictions served established principles.
The dispute can be traced back to a memorable squabble between then-candidate Donald Trump and Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio during the 2016 Republican presidential primary, in which the senator joked about the size of Trump's hands ahead of a debate and said, "You know what they say about men with small hands."The would-be trademark refers to a joke about the size of former US president Donald Trump's hands.
Federal law bars people from registering a trademark of a name of a living person without their consent. The US Patent and Trademark Office refused registration because the use of the name "Trump" would be construed by the public as a reference to the former president. "The government can reasonably determine that, on the whole, protecting marks that include another living person's name without consent risks undermining the goals of trademark," Barrett wrote, in an opinion that was joined in part by the court's liberal wing. The bar on trademarking someone else's name, she wrote, "is therefore constitutional, both facially and as applied" to this case.
At oral arguments, the justices seemed inclined to side with the trademark office, with several raising doubts that Elster's free speech rights had been trampled on by the agency. Nothing stopped Elster from making or selling the T-shirts. In two recent cases, the court bolstered First Amendment protections when it declined to back decisions by the USPTO to deny trademark registrations based on other parts of the Lanham Act.