The V.I. Carnival Committee intends to enchantment a choose’s current ruling of their trademark dispute with Tourism Division officers.
“Within the phrases of John Paul Jones and FDR, now we have solely simply begun to battle,” Carnival Committee Chairman Edgar Baker Phillips stated in a press release. “This is a vital concern of federally safety property rights that have an effect on not solely the Carnival Committee, however different native companies and the massive corporations like Fb, Apple, and Amazon. We are going to enchantment and belief the judgement of the Third Circuit Court docket of Appeals and the US Supreme Court docket.”
The committee registered the logos “St. Thomas Carnival” and “Virgin Islands Carnival” with the U.S. Patent and Trademark workplace in 2007. Whereas the group had historically organized the occasion, the Legislature handed Act 8153 in 2019, which established the Division of Festivals underneath the Tourism Division and tasked the division with selling and executing the Carnival and Festivals on all three islands. The act added three no less than 4 paid positions to Tourism, when over time a lot of the actions had been carried out on a volunteer foundation by members of the Carnival Committee.
The Carnival Committee filed a lawsuit on March 28 by which the group’s lawyer, Terri Griffiths, argued that different entities are prohibited by federal legislation from utilizing carefully associated or “confusingly related” logos.
However the authorities has at all times supplied the funding essential to run Carnival, and Assistant V.I. Legal professional Basic Venetia Velasquez argued that the committee has no authority to cease the Tourism Division from organizing and working Carnival occasions on St. Thomas — or to make use of these phrases to explain the exercise.
Carnival “is a generic time period, and St. Thomas is the place we’re standing in the present day,” so barring the federal government from utilizing the these phrases whereas placing on Carnival occasions “could be so absurd and such a denial of the general public’s curiosity,” Velasquez stated at a listening to in April.
U.S. District Court docket Chief Decide Robert Molloy agreed with the federal government, and located that the phrases “are generic, and subsequently neither legitimate nor legally protectable,” based on an opinion filed Aug. 8.
Generic marks should not protected by the Lanham Act, and Molloy discovered that the committee’s logos “should not incontestable” underneath the legislation. He denied the Committee’s movement for a preliminary injunction, which sought to bar Tourism officers from utilizing the phrases.
Phillips stated his group intents to enchantment Molloy’s order, and he believes the court docket has not thought-about the entire motions and arguments introduced by the Committee, together with a 20-page movement for sanctions in opposition to the federal government filed by Griffiths, and see that they served the criticism on Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. in April.
