No. 18-302 IN THE Supreme Court of the United States ANDREI IANCU, UNDER SECRETARY OF COMMERCE FOR INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND DIRECTOR, UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE, Petitioner, v. ERIK BRUNETTI, Respondent. On Writ of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit BRIEF FOR PROFESSORS BARTON BEEBE AND JEANNE FROMER AS AMICI CURIAE SUPPORTING RESPONDENT JOSHUA J. BONE WILLIAM M. JAY GOODWIN PROCTER LLP Counsel of Record 100 Northern Ave. GOODWIN PROCTER LLP Boston, MA 02210 901 New York Ave., N.W. Washington, DC 20001 [email protected] (202) 346-4000 March 25, 2019 i TABLE OF CONTENTS INTEREST OF THE AMICI CURIAE ....................... 1 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT .................................................... 1 ARGUMENT ............................................................... 3 I. THE PTO’S ENFORCEMENT OF § 1052(a)’S IMMORAL-OR- SCANDALOUS-MARKS PROVISION IS SYSTEMATICALLY INCONSISTENT AND ARBITRARY. ......................................... 3 A. Study Design. .............................. 3 B. The PTO Routinely Refuses Registration on the Basis That the Asserted Mark Both Contravenes § 1052(a)’s Immoral-or- Scandalous-Marks Provision and § 1052(d)’s Prohibition on Registration of a Mark That Is Confusingly Similar to an Already-Registered Mark. .......... 7 C. The PTO Is Inconsistent and Arbitrary in Allowing Certain Applications to Overcome a § 1052(a) Immoral-or-Scandalous Refusal. ..................................... 17 ii D. The PTO Often Treats Identical or Highly Similar Marks on Identical or Highly Similar Goods Differently, Approving Some for Publication and Refusing Others as Immoral or Scandalous. ........... 22 E. In Its Immoral-or- Scandalous Refusals, the PTO Has Discriminated Between Registrable and Unregistrable Marks Based on Those Marks’ Viewpoint. ..... 28 II. THIS SYSTEMATIC INCONSISTENCY AND ARBITRARINESS OF PTO ENFORCEMENT OF THE IMMORAL-OR-SCANDALOUS- MARKS PROVISION SUGGEST THAT THE PROVISION VIOLATES THE FIRST AMENDMENT’S FREE SPEECH CLAUSE. ............................................. 29 A. Many of the Marks Subject to an Immoral-or- Scandalous Refusal Are Instances of High-Value Speech. ...................................... 30 iii B. Whichever Level of Scrutiny the Court Applies, the Inconsistency and Arbitrariness of the PTO’s Enforcement of the Immoral-or-Scandalous Marks Provision Are Constitutionally Problematic for a Lack of Fit Between the Provision’s Purposes and Its Enforcement. ............................. 34 C. The Inconsistency and Arbitrariness of the PTO’s Enforcement of the Immoral-or-Scandalous- Marks Provision Also Suggest That the Provision Is Unconstitutionally Vague. ....................................... 38 CONCLUSION ......................................................... 39 iv TABLE OF AUTHORITIES Page(s) Cases Ariz. Free Enterprise Club’s Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett, 564 U.S. 721 (2011) .............................................. 35 Baumgartner v. United States, 322 U.S. 665 (1944) .............................................. 33 Brown v. Entm’t Merchs. Ass’n, 564 U.S. 786 (2011) .............................................. 35 Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission of New York, 447 U.S. 557 (1980) ........................................ 35, 37 City of Ladue v. Gilleo, 512 U.S. 43 (1994) ................................................ 35 Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971) .......................................... 32, 33 Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983) .............................................. 30 In re E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., 476 F.2d 1357 (C.C.P.A. 1973) ............................. 16 FCC v. Pacifica Found., 438 U.S. 726 (1978) .............................................. 33 v Garrison v. Louisiana, 379 U.S. 64 (1964) ................................................ 30 Greater New Orleans Broad. Ass’n v. United States, 527 U.S. 173 (1999) .............................................. 37 Hustler Magazine, Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988) ................................................ 33 Kolender v. Lawson, 461 U.S. 352 (1983) .............................................. 38 Matal v. Tam, 137 S. Ct. 1744 (2017) ...................................passim Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Ariz., 135 S. Ct. 2218 (2015) ..................................... 34-35 Reno v. Am. Civil Liberties Union, 521 U.S. 844 (1997) ........................................ 36, 38 Rubin v. Coors Brewing Co., 514 U.S. 476 (1995) .............................................. 37 Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 382 U.S. 87 (1965) ................................................ 38 Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443 (2011) .............................................. 30 United States v. Playboy Entm’t Grp., Inc., 529 U.S. 803 (2000) .............................................. 33 vi Village of Hoffman Estates v. Flipside, Hoffman Estates, Inc., 455 U.S. 489 (1982) ......................................... 38-39 Williams-Yulee v. Fla. Bar, 135 S. Ct. 1656 (2015) .......................................... 35 Winters v. New York, 333 U.S. 507 (1948) .............................................. 39 Statutes 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a) .............................................passim 15 U.S.C. § 1051(a)(2) .................................................. 8 15 U.S.C. § 1052(d) .............................................passim Regulations 37 C.F.R. § 2.32(a)(7) ................................................... 8 Other Authorities Barton Beebe & Jeanne C. Fromer, Are We Running Out of Trademarks? An Empirical Study of Trademark Depletion and Congestion, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 945 (2018) ........................................... 1, 4, 6 Barton Beebe, Trademark Law: An Open-Source Casebook (5th ed. 2018) ..................... 5 vii Stuart Graham et al., U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, The USPTO TradeMark Case Files Dataset: Descriptions, Lessons, and Insights (2013) ...................................................................... 4 List of Classes with Explanatory Notes, World Intell. Prop. Org. (Jan. 1, 2017)........................................................................ 8 Patricia T. O’Conner & Stewart Kellerman, What Do You Call a %$*$##@?, Grammarphobia Blog, (Mar. 1, 2011) ....................................................... 25 Denise Restauri, When Cancer Gets Personal, a Daughter Gets Mad and Starts a Human Movement, Forbes, Dec. 17, 2013 ......................................................... 30 U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Trademark Case Files Dataset (2018) ................... 4 U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Trademark Manual of Examining Procedure § 1401.03 (Oct. 2017) ............................ 8 U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, Trademark process, https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks- getting-started/trademark- process#step1 .......................................................... 5 1 INTEREST OF THE AMICI CURIAE1 Amici are law professors at New York University School of Law. 2 We have no personal stake in the outcome of this case. Rather, we have a professional interest in seeing trademark law interpreted with fidelity to the First Amendment. We have recently published a large-scale empirical study of all 6.7 million trademark applications filed at the PTO from 1985 through 2016, together with the 300,000 trademarks already registered at the PTO as of 1985. See Barton Beebe & Jeanne C. Fromer, Are We Running Out of Trademarks? An Empirical Study of Trademark Depletion and Congestion, 131 Harv. L. Rev. 945 (2018) (Beebe & Fromer, Are We Running Out of Trademarks?). As a result of that work, we are in possession of comprehensive data on the operation of the trademark registration process at the PTO. This brief seeks to put these data at the Court’s disposal in the hope that doing so proves useful in resolving the question presented. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT In 2017, this Court held that the Lanham Act’s prohibition on the registration of trademarks that 1 All parties have consented to the filing of this brief. No counsel for a party authored this brief in whole or in part, and no person other than amici and their counsel made a monetary contribution to its preparation or submission. 2 Our institutional affiliation is given for identification purposes only. 2 “disparage * * * or bring * * * into contemp[t] or disrepute” any “persons, living or dead,” 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a), violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. Matal v. Tam, 137 S. Ct. 1744, 1751 (2017). This case presents the question whether the neighboring prohibition on the registration of trademarks that “[c]onsis[t] of or compris[e] immoral * * * or scandalous matter,” 15 U.S.C. § 1052(a), also runs afoul of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause. Whether this provision is unconstitutional turns in part on whether, and to what extent, the PTO has applied this provision arbitrarily or inconsistently. We have therefore undertaken a large-scale empirical study of trademark applications and registrations at the PTO to assess to what degree the PTO is arbitrary or inconsistent in its implementation of the § 1052(a) prohibition on the registration of immoral or scandalous marks. In particular, we have systematically studied all 3.6 million applications for marks that include text (which we refer to as “word-mark applications”) filed at the PTO from 2003 through 2015 to learn which marks the PTO has refused to register for being immoral or scandalous in contravention