Decisions · 87107590
In re Society of Health and Physical Educators
Serial No. 87107590 · Decided 2018-08-16 · Other
What happened
The Board refused SHAPE XXXX (where XXXX stands for any U.S. state name or Puerto Rico) for an educators' association’s materials and services because one application may only seek registration of one mark — a placeholder covering 51 different names is an unregistrable ‘phantom mark.’
The marks
Applicant
SHAPE XXXX (standard characters; per Applicant's miscellaneous statement, as amended, "The 'XXXX' in the mark denotes the unabbreviated name of a state of the United States and Puerto Rico," clarified by the Board to mean a single state name or Puerto Rico, not multiple state names)
"Printed materials directed to educational association members who are educators and education administrators, namely, educational journals in the fields of health education, physical education, recreation education, sports education and dance education," in Class 16; "Clothing, namely, shirts and t-shirts," in Class 25; "Education services for educational association members who are educators and education administrators, namely, conducting educational seminars, conferences, lecture programs and workshops, all in the fields of health education, physical education, sports education and dance education; providing information to educational association members who are educators and education administrators in the fields of health education, physical education, recreation education, sports education and dance education," in Class 41
Why this decision is significant
Precedential phantom-mark holding: SHAPE XXXX, where XXXX stands for any of the fifty state names or Puerto Rico, is really 51 different marks in a single application, and the permutations are not legal equivalents of one another.
Research significance is Trademark Valet's editorial rating of how useful a decision is to practitioners. It is not a statement of precedential weight — that is the separate Precedential field, which comes from the Board.
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The original record
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