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Author | Shuangmu@ Disclaimer | This article is copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission In recent years, major e-commerce platforms have paid more and more attention to intellectual property protection. However, trademark infringement issues have continued to emerge, and the sharp increase in cases of common words being registered as trademarks has attracted the attention of cross-border sellers.
It is learned that recently, according to the information revealed by many sellers, after "durable", the commonly used word "operation" has also been registered as a trademark , and using it on Amazon product pages may cause infringement. It is understood that since April, several sellers’ product listings have been found guilty of trademark abuse due to the use of “operation”, and some listings have even been removed from Amazon. After verification, "operation" has been registered as a related word trademark in multiple product categories such as toys, sports equipment, and instruments. It was successfully registered as early as 1966, and the registrant was the American toy giant Hasbro. ▲ The picture comes from the USPTO, the US trademark search website This means that if sellers of related products use "operation" as a descriptive word, it may constitute infringement. It is reported that "operation" means "operation, operation, action", and is often used on Amazon to describe a variety of products such as toys, machinery and home furnishings. Therefore, when the news came out, many sellers were very surprised: "Ah? Can this be registered as a trademark?" "Another common word trademark infringement. It's really hard to guard against." “I just added an operation in the five-point description, and I was reported, and the detail page was removed.” It has been observed that the industry seems to have entered a high incidence period of rulings on trademark infringements of commonly used words in recent times . According to incomplete statistics, in addition to "operation", the following common words have also been registered as trademarks, posing a risk of trademark infringement:- Adjectives: PINK, PURPLE, XM-L, Morandi, collapsible, perfect, inches, durable , etc.;
- Nouns: Apple, Hula Hoop, Unicorn, Summer, reed, ideal, Mooncake, etc.;
- Other common words: 100%, one, XM-L, Band-Aid, polo, USB, Tetris, chew, etc.
Among them, some sellers who use "Summer", "Morandi" and "collapsible" as product descriptions have also recently received performance notifications from Amazon. In addition, some sellers who use common words such as "XM-L" and "Unicorn" have been sued for trademark infringement by copyright holders and are considering forming a group to respond to the lawsuit. Here, it is recommended that all sellers pay more attention to the registration categories and scopes of the above-mentioned common word trademarks to avoid their listings being affected. It is worth mentioning that malicious trademark registrations have occurred frequently in the country in the past. Faced with the recent situation where a large number of common words have been registered as trademarks and related infringement incidents have occurred frequently, there has been constant discussion in the industry.
Potential trademark infringement has always been a common type of infringement in the industry, and common word trademark infringement is the most widespread type. Generally speaking, most common words cannot be registered as trademarks due to lack of distinctiveness and uniqueness. However, in recent years, it is not uncommon for common words to be registered as trademarks, and even cause legal disputes and economic losses to businesses: Take "XM-L" as an example. According to industry sources, last year a seller was sued by the copyright owner for millions of dollars for infringement of this common word.
Based on this, many sellers have speculated that some copyright holders who register common words as trademarks do so in order to earn high copyright fees. However, it has been observed that in addition to some organizations that intend to take shortcuts to make money, there are also genuine brand manufacturers who register common word trademarks: for example, Saule, LLC. registered "100%" for its brand products, and Hasbro registered "operation" for its brand. In most cases, these brands will not initiate infringement lawsuits, and some affected sellers are found guilty of trademark infringement due to platform machine scanning or malicious complaints from peers. According to Section 33b of the Lanham Act, professionals have analyzed that from a legal perspective, using common words to reasonably describe products is not likely to constitute infringement, and it is not difficult to file a complaint if the links of related sellers are judged to be "trademark abuse." Based on this, some sellers also said that the motivation of these brands to register common word trademarks may be "traffic", that is, by registering common words to monopolize most of the traffic of such keywords in order to increase product sales. However, for now, the above conclusions can only be regarded as speculation. In any case, at a time when trademark registration of common words has become a trend, the most important thing for sellers is to remain vigilant and find countermeasures to avoid unnecessary legal disputes and financial losses. Prevention: When writing product descriptions, you can carefully check whether the words have infringement risks in advance through the official websites of major trademark and patent searches; Response: When facing trademark infringement notices of common words from e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, you can restore the link to normal by modifying or deleting the trademark words. For example, you can first use a template refresh to delete the trademark words. If there is no change, open a case to ask for the specific trademark words, then repeat the template refresh, and then submit an appeal to confirm that the violation has not occurred again. Finally, we would like to remind all sellers to pay attention to relevant changes in a timely manner to avoid affecting product sales due to link performance issues. If you have the latest relevant news, you can also share it in the comment area~
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