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Michael Palmisciano was quoted in the article "'Trump Too Small' High Court Fight Targets Another Trademark Ban," published in Bloomberg Law. The article addresses the US Supreme Court's recent agreement to consider the trademark application for “Trump Too Small” and its potential violation of the registration ban on free speech grounds. The US Patent and Trademark Office is seeking to revive the Lanham Act’s bar against registering trademarks that identify a living person without their consent and distinguish it from recently struck down bans on disparaging and vulgar registrations.

Putting the debate in context of the US Supreme Court's 2017 Matal v. Tam and 2019 Iancu v. Brunetti decisions, and their implications on trademark registration restrictions against First Amendment rights, Michael said those opinions didn’t get “to the heart of” defining what a grant of a registration means from a First Amendment perspective, leaving questions about what can be referenced.

“Can Ford register ‘We are better than Tesla?’ ‘Tesla Sucks?’ It just seems we don’t make speech carveouts,” he continued. “I think the proper analysis is, ‘Someone owns a trademark in Tesla, so you can’t have anything that incorporates that.’ We don’t go there.”

“I am skeptical, if we zoom out, that this is a big issue," Michael continued. "It’s a constitutional issue, but out in practice, this isn’t something that comes across my desk very often.”