哈佛法律评论：中国申请人在美国申请注册不具字面意义商标造成的危害？
4340导读：美国商标注册越来越难，申请人为了追求商标注册的成功率，取名越来越随意化，随便几个字母组合只要没有类似的就进行申请注册，虽然商标的注册成功率提高了，但大批量的这种无字面意义商标申请造成的危害以及后续可能产生的影响也引起了USPTO和美国学术界的关注和思考。是否只要申请商标在先无类似冲突，商标本身具有显著性就应该获得商标的保护？这种商标是否会真正的投入市场使用？这些商标是否能真正帮助消费者区别商品/服务来源？ USPTO是否应该接受此类商标的申请？
A search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) trademark database reveals that in 2020, a single attorney named Elizabeth Yang filed over 8,000 proposed trademarks. This number is surprising in and of itself, but the proposed marks are perhaps even more unusual. In general, companies developing new trademarks seek marks that are clear and memorable, that suggest something about the goods with which they’re associated. Indeed, trademark lawyers sometimes clash with marketing experts, who want marks so descriptive of the goods they sell as to be unprotectable under trademark law. But the marks filed by Yang include LJXOAIEU for hair clips, QIANDLEE for apparel, JANRSTIC for headphones, and AEZLHJYA for jewelry. These words are not close to any in English, and the applications make clear that they have no meaning in any other language either.
美国专利商标局 (USPTO) 商标数据库搜索显示，2020 年，一位名叫 Elizabeth Yang 的律师提交了 8,000 多个商标。这个数字本身就令人惊讶，更不同寻常。一般而言，商标新申请的公司注重商标清晰易记的特点并力求体现与产品之间的联系。事实上，商标律师有时会与营销专家发生冲突。营销专家希望商标对销售产品有一定描述性质，但这却不受法律保护。但杨提交的商标，如LJXOAIEU（产品：发夹）、QIANDLEE（产品：服装）、JANRSTIC（产品：耳机）和AEZLHJYA（产品：珠宝）。这些词并不是英文单词，在其他语言中也没有任何含义。
It’s possible that these submissions are fraudulent: that the companies involved have not used and do not intend to use the marks in commerce and are lying to the USPTO. Apparently driven in part by economic incentives from the Chinese government, fraudulent trademark filings have been a growing problem in the United States and are a subject of concern among academics, politicians, and practitioners. Fraudulent filings can impose significant burdens on the U.S. trademark system.
这些商标申请可能具有欺骗性：所涉公司并没有也不打算在商业活动中实际使用这些商标，是在欺骗USPTO。显然，在中国政府经济鼓励政策的推动下，商标欺诈性申请的问题在美国日益凸显，成为学术界、政界人士和从业者关注的话题。欺诈性申请现象给美国商标制度带来重大负担。
But there’s another possibility for these proposed marks, based not on the incentives offered by the Chinese government, but on those offered by Amazon. Since 2017, Amazon has required a registered trademark for Brand Registry access. So sellers, many based outside the United States, just want to get a registered trademark as quickly as possible, so that they can make it onto the Brand Registry.
这些不具字面意思商标的申请还存在另一种可能性，或许并不是基于中国政府的激励政策，而是基于亚马逊的激励措施。自2017 年起，亚马逊要求有注册商标才能进行品牌备案。因此，许多位于美国以外的卖家只想尽快获得注册商标，以便他们可以成功进行品牌备案。
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I. NONSENSE MARKS WITHIN EXISTING TRADEMARK LAW
现行商标法下的不具字面意思的商标
Foundational to trademark law is an understanding that trademarks offer social value and therefore should be legally protected. The dominant justification for trademark law within the United States, Search-costs theory, maintains that trademarks are beneficial because consumers recognize them as identifiers of the source of goods they en- counter. This recognition then allows those consumers to rely on trade- marks to streamline their purchasing decisions, minimizing the burden of having to sort through and compare the characteristics of goods each time they want to buy something.But non-sense trademark are generally unpronounceable and difficult to remember or distinguish, nonsense marks fail to do what most companies want marks to do and what the theoretical foundations of trademark law assume that they will do: create a lasting impression on consumers.
商标法的基础是理解商标能产生社会价值，因此应受到法律保护。搜索成本理论是美国商标法中的主要依据，认为商标在消费者辨别商品来源时为其提供了极大便利。消费者通过辨别商标能更快地作出购物选择，极大减少他们每次想买东西时对比商品特性的负担。但是不具字面意思的商标通常难以发音，而且比较难记或区分，因此无法达到大多数公司注册商标的目的，也无法满足商标法理论基础的设定：商标应让消费者留下长久的印象。
While these marks do not work in the way the trademark system assumes they will, paradoxically, it is for that precise reason that they face virtually no barriers to trademark registration. Most applied for marks are required to be distinctive of their source. Nonsense trademark can easily achieve distinctiveness.
尽管不具字面意思的商标并没有遵循商标体系假定的作用方式，但矛盾的是，也正是出于这个原因，使得其在注册时几乎毫无障碍。大多数申请商标要求其具有显著性。而不具字面意思的商标很容易就能满足这一点。
Nonsense marks do not look like trademarks typically look or work the way the trademark system assumes they are supposed to. But be- cause of that quality, rather than in spite of it, nonsense marks easily meet all of the formal requirements for trademark registration and may even receive stronger protections than do many more typical marks. Put another way, within the existing registration system, everything but common sense indicates that these words should be valid trademarks.
不具字面意思的商标看起来与典型商标不同，作用方式也与商标体系假定的不相一致。但正是因为这点特质，不具字面意思的商标很容易就满足商标注册的官方要求，甚至还能比典型商标获得的保护性更强。换句话说，在现有的商标制度下，除去那些表明常识的单词，所有组成都可以成为有效的商标。
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Ⅱ. THE HARMS OF NONSENSE MARKS
不具字面意思的商标的危害
First, and most basically, applications for nonsense marks place further stress on an already-strained USPTO. Indeed, examiners, wary of fraudulent marks from China in general, may spend even more time than usual reviewing nonsense marks from Chinese companies. By calling on the resources of the USPTO to achieve their owners’ Amazon-related objectives, nonsense-mark applications themselves impose costs on the USPTO, as well as on other applicants affected by examiners’ greater caseloads and slower review processes.
首先也是最基本的，不具字面意思的商标的申请给处在紧绷状态的美国专利商局带去更多压力。事实上，审查员普遍对来自中国的欺诈性商标持谨慎态度，他们可能比平时花费更多的时间来审查中国公司的不具字面意思的商标申请。不具字面意思的商标申请通过利用美国专利商标局的资源来达到它们亚马逊相关的商业目标，这本身增加了美国专利商标局的成本，同时加重了审查员的案件量负担，也使得审查流程更加缓慢。
Once nonsense marks make it onto the Register, they have the potential to inflict further harm, particularly on traditional mark owners. To avoid opposition from the USPTO or other mark owners, those seeking to register new marks must avoid words that might be seen as confusingly similar to existing marks. If traditional marks were already on the Register, the mark owners might be compelled to invest time and resources arguing that the similar but nonsensical mark presents a likelihood of confusion. Worse, if nonsense marks make it onto the Register first, potential registrants, already facing a diminishing number of “good,” available trademarks, might be hesitant to apply with their marks out of fear of a likelihood-of-confusion rejection. This chilling effect would be particularly acute for smaller businesses, which may not be able to afford a potentially lengthy and expensive registration battle.
一旦不具字面意思的商标得以注册，它们可能会造成进一步损害，特别是对传统的商标所有人而言。为避免美国专利商标局的驳回或其他商标的异议，商标申请人必须避免使用与在先商标近似的文字。若传统商标得以在先注册，传统商标所有人可能被迫投入时间和资源来争辩在先商标与那些近似却不具字面意思的的商标可能造成混淆。更糟的情况是，不具字面意思的商标得以在先注册，潜在的商标注册人面对越来越少“好”的可用商标，并出于对近似驳回的担忧，可能会犹豫申请与否。对小型企业来说，这种寒蝉效应尤其严重，因为它们可能无法承受漫长而昂贵的注册战。
Finally, nonsense marks place considerable strain on the metrics that trademark law relies on to function. As an initial matter, nonsense marks challenge the ability of the Abercrombie spectrum-to identify the value of and consumer reaction to different categories of marks. Nonsense marks on the Register deepen the cracks in the foundation of one of trademark law’s major sorting mechanisms, calling into question Abercrombie’s legitimacy as an indicator of what makes a “strong” mark and leaving it less stable for those who look to it for guidance.
最后，不具字面意思的商标也对商标法赖以运作的衡量标准造成了相当大的压力。首先，不具字面意思的商标挑战了“阿伯克龙比谱”识别不同商标类别价值和消费者对不同类别反应的能力。不具字面意思的商标的注册动摇了“阿伯克龙比谱”这一商标法主要分类机制的根基，其作为衡量“强”商标指标的合法性及对人们的指导意义也受到了质疑。
Nonsense marks also defy trademark law’s ordinary heuristics for determining whether two marks are confusingly similar — both at the registration stage and in infringement suits. Presented with a likelihood-of-confusion case in which one or both marks consist of a random string of letters, it is not immediately clear how a decision-maker would assess the “similarity or dissimilarity of the marks in their entireties as to appearance, sound, connotation and commercial impression,” a “key consideration in any likelihood of confusion determination.”
不具字面意思的商标也违背了商标法的普通启发法，即在注册阶段和侵权诉讼中判断两个商标是否近似。若在商标近似案件中，存在一个或两个随机字母组合的商标，审查员则无法立刻阐明商标在其外观，声音，含义及商业印象上整体是否近似，也无法评估“任何可能确定混淆性的关键考虑因素”。
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Ⅲ. FAILURE TO FUNCTION DOCTRINE
功能失效原则
Despite the novelty of the issues nonsense marks present, the tool needed to address them already exists in trademark law, in the form of failure to function doctrine. The question of whether a mark actually functions as a trademark is critical to assessing whether it should receive protection, and any analysis focused just on distinctiveness, likelihood of confusion, or other more traditional grounds for refusal is necessarily incomplete. The USPTO has taken note: in recent years, failure to function has played an increasing role in registration refusals.
尽管不具字面意思的商标的问题很新颖，但现行商标法中已存在解决该问题的举措--也就是功能失效原则。商标是否真正具有商标功能，这一点对于评估其是否应该受到保护至关重要。仅仅关注显著性、近似混淆或其他更传统驳回理由的注册分析都必然是不完整的。USPTO 已经注意到：近年来，功能失效原则在驳回注册中扮演越来越重要的角色。
The doctrine relies on the basic premise that, to be registrable, a proposed mark must be used as a trademark. To establish valid trademark use, an applicant must show that the mark is used on or in connection with goods in commerce, but also that it actually works the way a trademark is supposed to. Failure to function has developed as a way to assess whether a given mark will be understood as a source indicator and to weed out those marks that will not.
该原则的基本前提是，所涉标记必须作为商标进行使用。为建立有效的商标使用，申请人必须表明该标记在相关商品上投入到实际的商业使用，并且确实发挥商标应发挥的作用。功能失效原则现可作为评估所涉标记是否能作为区分商品来源的判断依据。
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Ⅳ. LINGUISTIC FAILURE TO FUNCTION
语言功能障碍
Paying attention to how consumers are likely to receive, understand, and use nonsense marks, it becomes clear that, as these marks are composed of arbitrary, unpronounceable strings of letters, they do not work as trademarks should. In other words, they are not source identifying in the long term because consumers will find it difficult if not impossible to use them in this way. And, because they are not organized around a linguistic system of meaning, as soon as more than one nonsense mark exists, it becomes difficult to use any of them to distinguish the sources of different goods.
关注消费者可能如何去接受，理解和使用这些不具字面意思的商标，就不难发现这些随机字母组成无法发音的标记无法起到商标标识的作用。换句话说，不具字面意思的商标无法成为长期识别产品来源的标记，消费者也很难以这种方式使用它们。而且，由于不具字面意思的商标不适用于有含义的语言系统，一旦出现多个不具字面意思的的标记，消费者就难以使用它们来区分不同商品的来源。
As with all bases for refusal, linguistic failure to function will likely present close, difficult cases. However, if applied thoughtfully, it will also offer an effective, tailored tool for keeping off the Register most nonsense marks, which clearly do not work as trademarks should but which current trademark law is ill-equipped to handle.
与所有驳回理由一样，语言功能障碍也可能会出现疑难案件。但若适当运用，针对那些无法起到商标作用而现行商标法又很难处理的不具字面意思的商标，语言功能障碍将会成为避免此类商标注册的有效且契合的工具。
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Ⅴ. CONCLUSION
总结
Nonsense marks, the product of a changed landscape for consumer goods and of incentives created by Amazon, at once pose new challenges to the U.S. trademark system and contribute to the larger problem of an increasingly overburdened Register. Fortunately, existing trademark law already provides the tool to prevent the potential harm that these marks cause. Failure to function doctrine, which denies registration to marks that consumers will not perceive as source identifying, ensures that marks on the Register actually “work” as trademarks. By extending failure to function to encompass marks that do not work because they are linguistically incoherent and unmemorable, courts and the USPTO can keep these marks off the Register and prevent them from further muddying the trademark system.
不具字面意思的商标是消费品环境变化和亚马逊激励措施推动的产物，已经对美国商标体系构成新的挑战，并加剧了注册负担越来越重的问题。幸运的是，现有商标法已提供相关依据以防止这些不具字面意思的商标造成危害。功能失效原则，可驳回那些无法使消费者识别产品来源的商标，确保注册商标确实起到商标的作用。通过将失效范围扩大到包括因语言不连贯和难以记忆而不起作用的商标，法院和美国专利商标局可以将这些不具字面意思的商标排除在注册簿之外，并防止它们进一步扰乱商标系统。
感谢浙江工商大学刘文琦教授提供的英文资讯！
