Risqué Business: US Supreme Court Opens Trademark Registry to “Immoral or Scandalous” Trademarks
On June 24, 2019, the US Supreme Court invalidated the Lanham Act’s ban on registering “immoral or scandalous” trademarks. In Iancu v. Brunetti, the Court held that that the ban, in Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act, violated the First Amendment because it required the Government to discriminate against certain viewpoints: marks considered to have “immoral or scandalous” content. This decision was not unexpected, as it was presaged by the Court’s 2017 decision in…