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This Day in Disney

Walt Disney’s Trademark Application for Mickey Mouse Filed with US Patent Office

Hiya folks! On this day in 1928, Walt Disney Enterprises filed to trademark “Mickey Mouse” with the United States patent office, and to get more insight into this historic event, we turned to the CEO of Trademarkia.com, Raj Abhyanker, who is also an Intellectual Property attorney. “This is both a name mark and a logo mark, but primarily a name mark for Mickey Mouse,” he said recently. “It has a stylized logo (as seen in the Mickey Mouse shorts of the ’20s and ’30s), but it’s also a word mark filing for the name Mickey Mouse. It was used ‘for motion pictures reproduced in copies for sale.’ That was the official description that was provided to the trademark office. A trademark can be a name mark or it can be a logo mark. Both are trademarks. The name protects against confusingly similar names and the logo mark protects against confusingly similar logos. In this case, it’s a name mark, and since it appears to be the very first trademark for the name, it means if someone came up with Nickey Mouse or Zickey Mouse, something that wasn’t Mickey Mouse but was confusingly similar, then they would be infringing on Disney’s rights.”