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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Read the full story on or [www.cbc.ca]wired [wired.com] (or google it in the news).

U.S. trademark registration 4,473,631 [justia.com], issued to one Paul Ingrisano, aka "Pi Productions Corp" of New York. In January, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave Ingrisano a trademark on the symbol pi. — pi followed by a period — a design Ingrisano uses on T-shirts sold at some brick-and-mortar stores.

When Ingrisano discovered that California-based print-on-demand outlet Zazzle offered an array of clothing items that feature pi he had his attorney send the company a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter this month demanding their removal.
"This would be like McDonalds claiming the letter M as a trademark," wrote Jez Kemp [blogspot.com], whose Zazzle store offers apparel imagining pi dressed in a pirate costume. "The trademark is in the combination of style and symbol, not the symbol itself."
Attorney Millet defends the cease-and-desist letter. He says that to his knowledge none of the designs sold through Zazzle included the exact trademark pi. — pi followed by a period — but some of them were confusingly similar to his client's design.

In 2011, Ingrisano attempted to trademark [justia.com] the "I<3" — artnet [artnet.com] reports — which was "published for opposition" in June 2013. Reebok's intellectual property watchdogs claimed [uspto.gov] in a December 14, 2013 "Notice of Opposition" that "I<3" is too close to comfort to its own "I3" trademark

-- (q: how far away are you, SN dev guys, from handling properly the character HTML entities [wikipedia.org]? Come on! You only need to let them pass as they are, the browsers will take care).

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