Philips Application for ‘hdr’ Trademark Registration Progresses at PTO

PTO in its history has granted eight registrations for trademarks containing the letters HDR, all of them short for high dynamic range, agency records show. But Philips would be the first granted a trademark bearing only the HDR letters, albeit as part of a stylized logo in red, orange, green, yellow, blue, black and white that, in contrast to all the others, uses all-lower case letters. Philips Intellectual Property and Standards, of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, applied for the trademark Jan. 30, PTO records show.

It remains unclear how Philips would use the trademark if granted the registration. The team promoting the Philips HDR proposal, one of two proprietary systems along with Dolby Vision to be designated as HDR options in the Ultra HD Blu-ray format, is based in the same Philips Intellectual Property and Standards offices in Eindhoven from which the trademark application emanated. But Philips HDR team spokesman Marty Gordon said the team, which expects to use CES to announce its first SoC vendor support (see 1509100065), has no plans to use the hdr logo in its forthcoming activities to win adoption of the Philips HDR system. Representatives of corporate Philips or the various entities such as Funai and TP Vision that license the Philips brand for TVs and other CE products didn’t comment.

PTO initially refused the Philips application on the grounds it would cause “a likelihood of confusion” with the other registered marks bearing the letters HDR, the agency said in a May 13 letter. U.S. trademark law “bars registration of an applied-for mark that so resembles a registered mark that it is likely a potential consumer would be confused, mistaken, or deceived as to the source of the goods and/or services of the applicant and registrant,” the agency said. And PTO told Philips “the addition of the design elements to the applied-for mark does not obviate the likelihood of confusion because, for a composite mark containing both words and a design, the word portion may be more likely to be impressed upon a purchaser’s memory and to be used when requesting the goods and/or services.”

But Philips disagreed, saying the previously registered trademarks “arguably achieved their distinctiveness” by adding a single letter or word to HDR, the company told PTO in a Nov. 5 response. “In each of these cases, the mark must have been viewed in its entirety in order for them to be considered registrable,” Philips said. The Philips mark “presents an admittedly descriptive wording HDR in a stylized format coupled with a distinctive design element (3 overlapping rectangles in a rainbow of colors),” it said.

Philips “submits that its applied-for mark is at least as distinctive as any of the noted registered marks, particularly those distinguished by the appending of a single letter,” the company said. Case law also supports the finding that the registered trademarks and the Philips application “should be compared in their entirety, and not just with respect to a similar portion,” Philips said. “In view of the above,” Philips “submits that the applied-for mark is not confusingly similar to the registered marks,” and asks “that this application be found registrable and passed on to publication,” it told PTO. In the end, the agency agreed.

Of the previously registered trademarks bearing HDR as a designation, the oldest is for HDRC (registration number 2280551), granted in September 1999 to the Institute for Microelectronics in Stuttgart, Germany, and renewed 10 years later for a series of high-dynamic-range CMOS image sensors, agency records show. HDRx”(registration number 4032678) was another HDR mark with a single-letter modifier. It was registered September 2011 to Red, based in Irvine, California, for “a proprietary HDR video solution that was invented” for the company’s Epic and Scarlet digital cinema cameras, its website shows.

Of the remaining trademarks on the PTO books, all combine HDR with a second word. Unified Color Technologies landed the trademarks HDR Expose (registration number 4072724) in December 2011 and HDR Express (registration number 4195055) in August 2012. The company, later renamed Pinnacle Imaging Systems, is a Belmont, California, supplier of HDR digital imaging software for professional photographers, its website shows.

Ginger HDR (registration number 4339530) was registered May 2013 to a company called 19lights, PTO records show. Though information on 19Lights was hard to come by online, various websites describe Ginger HDR as an HDR tone-mapping plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects. Those are animation and creative compositing apps for motion graphics and visual effects, the websites say.

The trademark JPEG-HDR (registration number 4545322) was registered June 2014 to a more familiar name, Dolby Labs, PTO records show. A Dolby backgrounder describes JPEG-HDR as capable of producing “true high-dynamic-range images in a JPEG-compatible still-photo format for smartphones and other cameras.” The most recent HDR trademark on PTO's books, goHDR (registration number 4780483), was registered in July to a company of the same name based in Kenilworth, U.K. GoHDR is a U.K. technology firm that at last April’s NAB Show advocated a “two-stream approach” to HDR video compression as one that's “much more future-proof than the one-stream methods which are currently getting so much attention” (see 1502250049).