The Death of the Supplemental Register?

Let’s all hope that the Supplemental Trademark Register is not on the death watch. It appears though to be on life support, at times, and especially with the USPTO’s heightened focus on “merely informational” matter, including laudatory messages. This is a common basis for registration refusal nowadays: “Merely informational matter fails to function as a mark to indicate source and thus is not registrable.” Don’t all valid trademarks communicate information? Exactly. How does the USPTO know when at least one of the bits of that information is not about the source? It cannot be fatal to validity that a mark communicates more information than simply source, see a suggestive mark or a descriptive one that has become distinctive. Although not a laudatory example, the first precedential decision from the TTAB in 2019 denied Wal-Mart’s application on the Principal Register, for INVESTING IN AMERICAN JOBS, a slogan for retail store…

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