Is this a trademark violation?

[smsuperstrat]

Was googling doing research on the Mira when I ran across this.
http://www.buscarino.com/mira.html

Who knows maybe this guy made the Mira first?

 

[JMintzer]

Depends. If PRS registered the name, then yes...


Jamie

 

[László]

Depends. If PRS registered the name, then yes...


Jamie

The PRS registration does show up as "live" on the USPTO trademark database. But whether use of a mark constitutes infringement can be more complicated than that, and can depend on several factors. As with copyrights, what registration does is entitle the owner of a registered mark to certain rights that owners of common law trademarks do not have. But it doesn't always preclude the other use.

It's not always cut and dried. Prior common law uses can come into play though they may be territorially limited. And there can be other peccadilloes of the interplay between federal registration of a junior mark and prior use of a senior one. Note that I'm not saying there is a prior use.

These are the kinds of issues that make lawyers and judges go cross-eyed at times, and largely explains why I'm glad I've been in music the past 20 years.

And of course, if the use is unrelated, say for a food product, it's not necessarily going to be barred, unless it creates confusion in the market (though that obviously doesn't apply here). So it might be ok to sell "Mira" tomatoes, but not "PRS Mira" tomatoes, since the latter implies that PRS the company is involved with the product.

 

[Greg]

Mira has been the name of a star for hundreds of years (it's also known as Omicron Ceti) in the constelatun Cetus.
It was named by Johannes Hevelius in 1638 and it appears in 1662's Historiola Mirae Stellae atlas.

Mira means "wonderful" or "astonishing," in Latin.

It's as much a unique name for a guitar as say... Bert :wink: