June Deadline Looms at PTO on Agency Pushback To Use ‘CTA’ as Stand-alone Trademark
CTA faces a June 9 deadline for responding to Patent and Trademark Office pushback on its Aug. 25 application (see 1511110002) to register the CTA initials as a stand-alone trademark, PTO records show.
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PTO examiners appear from the records to have no problems with the application to register the full Consumer Technology Association name. But a “prior-filed pending application may present a bar” to landing CTA as a stand-alone registration (serial number 86736073) or even in a separate application to use the initials in conjunction with the full Consumer Technology Association name (serial number 86736040), the agency emailed Wiley Rein partner Christopher Kelly, CTA’s lead outside trademark attorney.
The earlier application to which PTO alluded (serial number 79172042), filed April 24, was to extend U.S. protection for an international trademark for the CTA initials registered to the Chartered Institute of Taxation, a London-based nonprofit that bills itself as the "leading professional body" in the U.K. “for advisers dealing with all aspects of taxation,” its website says. Though the group itself goes by the CIOT initials, it runs a certification testing and education program it calls CTA, short for “chartered tax adviser,” the website says.
If CIOT’s CTA international registration advances to the stage of U.S. protection, the Consumer Technology Association’s CTA application “may be refused registration” under trademark law “because of a likelihood of confusion between the two marks,” PTO said. In responding by June to the PTO pushback, CTA “may present arguments in support of registration by addressing the issue of the potential conflict between applicant’s mark and the mark in the referenced application,” the agency said. Though CTA is widely known as the producer of CES and CIOT produces no such global trade shows, one possible source of concern for PTO examiners was apparently the similarity with which both described their intentions to use the CTA name for a range of technical training and educational services. CTA representatives didn’t comment Thursday.
In all, 88 instances of “CTA” appear on PTO’s books either as trademark applications live or dead or as full-fledged registrations in good standing, agency records show. Among the latter are two registrations awarded in 1992, and renewed a decade later, to the Chicago Transit Authority for the “CTA” logo or plain-word acronym, those records show. That CTA bore such similarity to the Chicago Transit Authority initials was a running joke among attendees at CTA’s New York Innovate! conference in November where the association’s name change was officially announced and approved in a membership voice vote.