: Can a logo using licensed fonts be trademarked? I made a logo using fonts with a free license for commercial use, my clients wants to trademark the logo. Can he do it? My concern is that

@Samaraweera207

Depends


Trademarks, design patents and copyrights

There are three types of protection that can be afforded to typefaces
and fonts in addition to basic license agreements: trademark, design
patent and copyright. These are intended to keep non-licensees from
copying the fonts in some way and passing them off as original
material. They each have implications for the computer support person.

The Trademark system is the weakest form of protection, allowing only
the font name itself to be protected. Hermann Zapf's popular typeface
PalatinoTM is arguably the most copied typeface in the world. Many
companies made their own identical versions of it (including the Book
Antiqua distributed in the past by Microsoft), but had to change the
name. This means that no one is allowed to use a currently existing
typeface name for a new font, even if the fonts are completely
unrelated.

The Design Patent system is the strongest, but most uncommon type of
protection. The designation is relatively rare because of the cost and
effort involved, but is powerful. It is the only US legal precedent
that protects the actual design - the individual shapes of the letters
in a font. The Lucida font family (designed by Bigelow and Holmes)
were some of the first digital fonts to be given a patent. If a
designer were to copy them, even by redrawing them from scratch using
pencil and paper, he would be in serious legal trouble.

The Copyright system is the most commonly used type of protection, but
has also been the most vague and difficult to enforce. There is no
explicit protection for fonts or typeface designs in US copyright law.
Hence, fonts have, until recently, fallen between the cracks in the
justice system.

scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=UNESCO_Font_Lic

I grabbed the following from this lawsuit:


The names of particular fonts may be protected by a
trademark. This is the weakest form of protection because only the
font name itself is being protected. For example, the letters that
make up the trademarked font Palatino can be copied but the name must
be changed.

URW++ was involved in a 1995 lawsuit with Monotype Corporation for
cloning their fonts and naming them with a name starting with the same
three letters. As typeface shapes themselves cannot be copyrighted in
the United States, the lawsuit centered on trademark infringement. A
US court decided that Monotype's trademarks were "fanciful" and did
not have descriptive value of the actual products. However it also
decided that URW was confusing the public deliberately because "the
purloining of the first part of a well-known trademark and the
appending of it to a worthless suffix is a method of trademark
poaching long condemned by the courts." The court issued an injunction
preventing URW from using their chosen names.


and one more example from the same source


In 21 January 2016,[17] Font Brothers filed a lawsuit against Hasbro,
claiming that Hasbro used the “Generation B” font for its My Little
Pony product without permission. Font Brothers claimed that Hasbro had
refused to comply with their licensing request. They are also claiming
substantial damages, from loss of revenue for this misuse, and
requesting a jury trial to resolve this matter.[18]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protection_of_typefaces#Trademarks

Sorry in advance for wikipedia

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