In my local news it seems that the city of Philadelphia may be infringing on a trademark. The city is rolling out a bike share program and named it Indego, the only problem is a company in Cleveland has that name trademarked. A representative from the Cleveland company said they will look into whethere or not they want to block the name.
Kathleen Conlon, a spokeswoman for Independence Blue Cross said she felt comfortable there would be no one confused by the Indego name.
From Philly.com:
The catchy name selected for the city’s new bike-sharing program, “Indego,” is a registered trademark of a Cleveland company, which says it will investigate if it should try to block Philadelphia from using the name.
Mayor Nutter unveiled the $16 million bike-share program Wednesday at a City Hall event.
The Indego name was designed to celebrate the $8.5 million contribution to the program by Independence Blue Cross, combining “independence” and “go.”
Read more at Philly.com
The INDEGO trademark from Cleveland is registered in the U.S. only in Class 9 for “Robotic exoskeleton suits worn by humans to assist in walking.” It’s pretty unlikely that there would be confusion with a bike-sharing program.
I don’t understand the purpose of this article It’s like you think if someone has a trademark, nobody else can use that word even for completely unrelated businesses.
@daaman well it could be pointing out that ,that a trademark cannot have a monopoly, unless of course you are a UDRP complainant where the Panelist will act as if the Complainant has a worldwide monopoly, but dare a respondent have a trade mark then that is a a worthless piece of paper.
That didn’t seem the tone of the article, but yes your point about the UDRP thinking trademarks a worldwide monopoly is true, and that seems to also seems to what the author thinks
The article was written by a writer at Philly.com who I doubt has any background in Trademark law and certainly has no idea what a UDRP is, living here in Philadelphia, some are concerned the Cleveland company makes them change the name of the program. This has nothing to do with UDRP as this is a city bike sharing program, the Cleveland company already owns Indego.com. I think they will get it worked out, Independence Blue Cross is a big company and should be able to smooth things out with the Cleveland company.
It appears that Philly’s bike sharing program is set up at rideindego.com. The logo for the program shows “Inde” and “go” in 2 different colors, showing its reference to INDEpendence Blue Cross, and GO for a ride. There shouldn’t be much, if any, argument over this one. They have also registered INDEGO.BIKE (redirecting to rideindego.com) through Bicycle Transit Systems. It would have been nice to see them actually utilize and promote .BIKE, but the registration at least shows how a new gTLD can immediately identify and differentiate the niche that the business is in.