Descriptiveness
Definition
The characteristic of a mark that directly describes a feature, quality, or ingredient of the goods or services. Descriptive marks receive little or no protection unless they have acquired secondary meaning through extensive use.
Related terms
- Corpus linguistics
- The study of language through large, principled collections of texts or transcripts. In forensic work, corpus methods are used to count how...
- Genericness
- The condition in which a brand name has become the common noun for a class of goods or services in public usage,...
- Likelihood of confusion
- The central test in trademark infringement: whether a reasonably attentive consumer would be confused about the commercial source of goods or services...
- Phonological similarity
- The degree to which two marks sound alike when pronounced, assessed through minimal pair analysis, prosodic structure (syllable count and stress), and...
- Secondary meaning
- The association that consumers make between a mark and a specific source, acquired over time through extensive use, even if the mark...
Explained in
- Trademark and Brand-Name Disputes: Linguistic EvidenceThe characteristic of a mark that directly describes a feature, quality, or ingredient of the goods or services. Descriptive marks receive little or no protect...