Our Chicago partner, Paula Jill Krasny, was interviewed by Crain’s Chicago Business Journal concerning the evolving international trademark dispute over the Arthur Anderson accounting brand. Here is an excerpt of the article:
There are multiple issues to analyze when considering who owns a given trademark, said Paula Krasny, an intellectual property partner in the Chicago office of Culhane Meadows. The Patent & Trademark office will weigh which party used a mark first and whether confusion could result from multiple users. There’s territorial disputes as well, since trademarks must be registered country by country. But the office is the beginning, not the end, of any IP dispute.
“If they want to sue each other for infringement, they have to go to court,” Krasny said. “What’s going on in the PTO is not the final word.”