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Are Investment Ticker Symbols Covered By Trademark Law?
from the perhaps dept
Here's an interesting trademark law dispute that hits on something I never would have considered before: can there be trademark protection in a ticker symbol? My first reaction, honestly, was that the whole concept is silly. A ticker symbol is unique, and anyone buying a particular product should simply know what they're investing in, and that includes entering the correct ticker. However, the actual lawsuit (posted below) does make a stronger than expected case that Invesco appears to have copied the ticker symbols of more popular Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and simply added an "S" to the end of each fund. The suing company is a trust, that appears to somehow be associated with S&P, and offers a bunch of ETFs covering different industries, and each one has a ticker symbol that begins with XL, so XLU is for Utilities and XLI is for Industrial. Invesco offered its own series of ETFs, which always began with a P in the ticker symbol, but recently launched a new series of ETFs, each of which matches the categories of the S&P trust industrial categories, where the symbol is identical, except for an S at the end -- i.e., XLUS for Utilities and XLIS for Industrial.
When you look at it that way, suddenly the trademark claim actually looks a bit stronger. The Invesco ETFs do match exactly the plaintiff's list of ETFs, with just the "S" added. I still think that claiming trademark on a ticker symbol seems a bit strange, but it certainly appears that there's at least some intent to confuse potential purchasers of the ETF into thinking Invesco's offerings are actually from the plaintiff trust instead...
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Designed to confuse
Then again, there is so much information on these funds readily available online that anyone not doing the tiny bit of research required to clear up the confusion probably deserves to lose their money.
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50000 shares Akron Toaster and Tunafish
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Re: Designed to confuse
Passing off is very basically a common law action which enables you to stop someone from representing themselves as you, assuming that misrepresentation is somehow detrimental to you in some abstract way of course.
I'm not convinced on TM on ticker symbols... sounds slippery to me. But PO is pretty plausible from what I can see.
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Slightly more complicated
On a quick search, I came across this opinion for someone at Davis and Gilbert: "There is no relationship between ticker symbols and the trademark law. But letters can be registered under the trademark laws. So if a company is
assigned a ticker symbol eg. DVD and it wants to register it as trade dress, they can (If not registered by anybody already) Examples are VW, ABC and NBC. This is no way a legal advise. Wilson Addo Davis & Gilbert
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Re: Designed to confuse
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Tickers are owned by the issuing authority
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And copyright in prices
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Not too confusing
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