After winning his case at the Supreme Court allowing the trademarking of a word that can be pronounced the same way as the past participle of a swear word, a designer found his application to trademark the actual swear word rejected by the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB).
In a precedent-setting decision, the TTAB ruled on Aug. 22 that the curse word had become omnipresent in recent years and “now appears without fuss in an impressive range of cultural domains” and is not suitable for registration as a trademark.
The case goes back to June 2019, when the Supreme Court ruled (pdf) in Iancu v. Brunetti, overturning a ban preventing “immoral” or “scandalous” words and symbols from being trademarked, and finding the prohibition against such words in the Trademark Act, also known as the Lanham Act, violated First Amendment speech protections, as The Epoch Times reported at the time….