WASHINGTON--The Supreme Court on Monday struck down a longstanding U.S. ban on trademarks on "immoral" or "scandalous" words and symbols, ruling in a case involving a clothing brand with an indelicate name that the law violates constitutional free speech rights.
The justices ruled against President Donald Trump's administration, which defended the law that had been in place since 1905, and in favour of Los Angeles streetwear designer Erik Brunetti, who was turned down by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office when he sought to trademark his brand name FUCT.
All nine justices agreed in the decision written by liberal Justice Elena Kagan that the prohibition on "immoral" trademarks ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment right to free expression. However, three justices wrote dissents to say the bar on "scandalous" trademarks should have been upheld.
The Supreme Court followed a course it took in 2017 when it struck down a similar law forbidding the registration of "disparaging" trademarks in a case involving an Asian-American dance rock band called The Slants, a name federal trademark officials had deemed offensive to Asians.
When the 2011 trademark application for FUCT was rejected, the Patent and Trademark Office noted that brand name sounds like a profanity - sometimes politely called the "F-word" - though is spelled differently, and concluded that Brunetti's products contained sexual imagery, misogyny and violence.
"There are a great many immoral and scandalous ideas in the world (even more than there are swear words)," Kagan wrote in Monday's decision, adding that the trademark law covers them all. "It therefore violates the First Amendment."
"Today is a good day for Americans," Brunetti's lawyer John Sommer said. "The U.S. Supreme Court has taken the government out of the business of deciding questions of morality."
The Patent and Trademark Office said it was reviewing the decision. The Justice Department declined to comment.
The justices, who are due to wrap up their current term in the coming days with a handful of other major rulings on tap, upheld a 2017 lower court ruling striking down the law. The decision removes the authority of government officials to bar federal trademark registration for profane language or sexually graphic images.
The Trump administration had warned that invalidating the law would unleash a torrent of extreme words and sexually graphic images on the marketplace. Brunetti's brand includes products such as a pullover sweatshirt saying "The world is fuct," sweatpants saying "We are fuct," and a T-shirt saying "Fuct is free speech, free speech is fuct."
