Trademarks

When the founders of the L.A. clothing brand the Hundreds first met, they were unhappy law school students looking for a way out. Six years after they started designing T-shirts to ease the boredom they felt in class, 29-year-old Bobby Kim and Ben Shenassafar are running a humming business, complete with a website, blog and their own mini-subculture out of a storefront in the Fairfax District and a warehouse near downtown.

After 18 years of dueling lawsuits, courtroom clashes and allegations of impropriety, Walt Disney Co. finally can close the storybook on its battle with the family that holds lucrative rights to Winnie the Pooh. On Friday, a federal judge ruled in favor of Disney by granting the company's motion to dismiss a copyright and trademark infringement claim brought by the family of Stephen Slesinger, who was a pioneer in the commercialization of cartoon characters. In 1930, Slesinger acquired the Pooh merchandising rights from British author A.A. Milne, who created the popular children's stories.

A shop on the Santa Cruz wharf will stop selling T-shirts marked "Surf City, Santa Cruz California, U.S.A.," ending more than a year of litigation with the Huntington Beach tourist bureau, a lawyer for the agency said Sunday. The suit became a proxy debate over which California beach town could call itself the nation's surf capital. The Huntington Beach Conference and Visitors Bureau registered the "Surf City U.S.A."

The University of Southern California and the University of South Carolina share the same initials. But they won't be sharing a trademark logo. Not now that the administrative tribunal of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has ruled that the local USC has priority of use when it comes to the "SC" logo, including the interlocking version.

Walt Disney Co.'s ESPN cable-television network must face allegations by Quiksilver Inc. that a logo for its international X Games sports competition violates a clothing trademark, a federal judge ruled. The emblem for ESPN's extreme-sports franchise is "strikingly similar" to the stylized X used by Quiksilver in the Gen X line of clothing, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said in a Friday ruling in New York.

There's a thaw in the century-old fight between Anheuser-Busch Cos. and Czech brewer Budejovicky Budvar. The companies announced a joint distribution deal Monday even as they vowed to continue their international legal fight over the Budweiser trademark. St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch said it agreed to distribute Budvar's Czechvar Premium Czech Lager, which is currently sold in 30 states.

Cisco to Apple: We need to talk. A day after Apple Inc. baptized its eagerly anticipated super-cellphone with the marketing slogan "We need to talk," Cisco Systems Inc. filed a trademark lawsuit Wednesday pointing out that it has owned the iPhone name since 2000. Until Monday night, the two companies were negotiating over the name. Cisco, which acquired the name when it bought another company, was willing to "share," Cisco spokeswoman Terry Anderson said. Apple, apparently, was not.

A federal judge Wednesday rejected a request from the Conference and Visitors Bureau to move a lawsuit that challenges its "Surf City USA" trademarks to Southern California. A Santa Cruz company that runs beach shops filed suit this fall after the bureau told it to stop selling T-shirts that read "Surf City Santa Cruz California USA." U.S. District Judge Maxine M.

Walt Disney Co. is facing a new legal front in its battle over the right to the Winnie the Pooh characters. Stephen Slesinger Inc., which owns the merchandising rights to the characters and traces its stake to a 1930 agreement with Pooh creator A.A. Milne, is seeking to cancel the U.S. trademarks of 25 Pooh-related names obtained by Disney since 1996. Disney "was not the owner of the registered marks at the time that these filings were made," Slesinger said of the trademark applications.

Converse Inc. will share sales revenue from shoes bearing the colors and founding dates of black fraternities and sororities to settle a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by the Greek organizations, Converse and the groups said. The organizations will drop the lawsuit they filed in Dallas federal court in 2003, and North Andover, Mass.-based Converse will pay them a percentage of revenue on each product sold that bears their trademarks.