American Steel & Wire Co. v. Sieraski

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• finding error in district court’s reading of dictionary definition as “the crucial factor in assessing genericness”
• analyzing federal trademark infringement and unfair competition claims and related state law trademark claims together based on single question of genericness
• declining to look at the individual words in a composite phrase individually
• “If the term is generic, it cannot be the subject of trademark protection under any circumstances, even with a showing of secondary meaning.”
• the “ultimate test” of genericness is “how a term is understood by the consuming public”
• the Ninth Circuit places “significant but not controlling weight on the dictionary definitions”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).