LoveFrom Seeks to Protect its Trademark in 25 Different Categories of Goods
Alt Legal Team | August 01, 2019
Jony Ive, whose design work at Apple includes such products as the iMac, iPod, and iPhone, announced last month in an interview with Financial Times that he intended to leave the company and start his own design company called LoveFrom.
Although the scope of LoveFrom has not yet been announced, Ive also indicated in the same interview that he will continue to do work with Apple and wearable tech and that technology’s utility in health and wellbeing is an area of personal interest for him.
Presumably in preparation for the launch of the new design firm, Ive’s company appears to have filed in late May a trademark application for “LOVEFROM JONY.” The application was first filed with the Jamaica Intellectual Property Office using Sincerely Ltd. B.V., a Netherlands-based entity with an address in California.
Notably, the USPTO application uses a similar method to that employed by Apple and Google. The method entails filing first in a foreign country, such as Jamaica, that does not provide access to digital trademark records but that also is party to a treaty that provides for the same priority filing date in the United States as in the country of filing.
Using Section 44(d) of the Trademark (Lanham) Act, the applicant can rely on a foreign application in select countries (like Jamaica) to establish a priority filing date. This effectively allows filers to keep trademark filings secret for as long as six months. For more details about this practice, check out this article.
Even more notable is the number and breadth of products listed on the 1(b) application, an application based on bona fide intent to use, rather than actual use. The USPTO filing fees alone racked up to $6,875 because of the 25 international classes that were included.
In all the application lists over 1,500 specific products, including such varied gems as growth preparations for hair, snuff boxes, degreasers and grinding preparations, machines for making pasta, trouser clips for cyclists, oil drainage containers, pizzas, meat gravies, reins for guiding children, and alcoholic beverages containing fruit.
The application also includes protection for “unworked or semi-worked bone, horn, ivory, whalebone or mother-of-pearl.” This may complicate his trademark process under TMEP 907 as whalebone and ivory sales are largely illegal under current regulations.
Ultimately, LoveFrom will have to file a statement of use showing the use of the mark LoveFrom Jony for each of these items to secure a trademark registration for the mark for that category of items. Given the number of products protected, the firm will have a lot of work on its hands with its goals to offer wheeled shopping bags, artificial turf, database management services, meteorological information, electronic shisha pipes, and more!
Check out the mammoth application for yourself here.
Special thanks to Chance Miller of 9to5 Mac for first reporting the story.