Utah Trademark Protection Act Dying a Slow Death

By Eric Goldman

As I reported before, the backroom negotiations over the Utah Trademark Protection Act have produced a compromise where Utah would still create a mark registry but there would no legal consequences to selling/purchasing a registered mark. Obviously, this is completely pointless, but even so, it would be an improvement over the misguided statute currently on the books.

Wisely, the Utah Department of Commerce is asking some questions about this compromise. According to BNA (subscription required), the department’s executive director has observed that the department hasn’t received any legislative appropriations to build the registry–which, to the executive director, provides another reason to kibosh the effort entirely. Recall that the Utah legislature initially expected the registry to generate lots of money for the state, so there is some irony seeing this ill-conceived initiative devolve into money squabbles between various branches of the Utah government.