430
Opinion of the Court
Some 20 years later Massachusetts enacted the first state statute protecting trademarks from dilution. It provided:
"Likelihood of injury to business reputation or of dilution of the distinctive quality of a trade name or trademark shall be a ground for injunctive relief in cases of trade-mark infringement or unfair competition notwithstanding the absence of competition between the parties or of confusion as to the source of goods or services." 1947 Mass. Acts p. 300, ch. 307.
Notably, that statute, unlike the "Odol" case, prohibited both the likelihood of "injury to business reputation" and "dilution." It thus expressly applied to both "tarnishment" and "blurring." At least 25 States passed similar laws in the decades before the FTDA was enacted in 1995. See Restatement (Third) of Unfair Competition § 25, Statutory Note (1995).
III
In 1988, when Congress adopted amendments to the Lanham Act, it gave consideration to an antidilution provision.
to be entirely sound. Such trademarks or tradenames as 'Blue Ribbon,' used, with or without registration, for all kinds of commodities or services, more than sixty times; 'Simplex' more than sixty times; 'Star,' as far back as 1898, nearly four hundred times; 'Anchor,' already registered over one hundred fifty times in 1898; 'Bull Dog,' over one hundred times by 1923; 'Gold Medal,' sixty-five times; '3-in-1' and '2-in-1,' seventy-nine times; 'Nox-all,' fifty times; 'Universal,' over thirty times; 'Lily White' over twenty times;—all these marks and names have, at this late date, very little distinctiveness in the public mind, and in most cases suggest merit, prominence or other qualities of goods or services in general, rather than the fact that the product or service, in connection with which the mark or name is used, emanates from a particular source. On the other hand, 'Rolls-Royce,' 'Aunt Jemima's,' 'Kodak,' 'Mazda,' 'Corona,' 'Nujol,' and 'Blue Goose,' are coined, arbitrary or fanciful words or phrases that have been added to rather than withdrawn from the human vocabulary by their owners, and have, from the very beginning, been associated in the public mind with a particular product, not with a variety of products, and have created in the public consciousness an impression or symbol of the excellence of the particular product in question." Id., at 828-829.
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