SCOTUS Curtails Foreign Reach of US Trademark Law in Surprise Ruling”

Joyce Liou spoke to the Global Legal Post about the Supreme Court’s decision in Abitron Austria GmbH v. Hetronic International, which held that two provisions in the Lanham Act that prohibit trademark infringement “are not extraterritorial and that they extend only to claims where the claimed infringing use in commerce is domestic.”

According to Joyce, until now, many courts have viewed the Lanham Act as an extraterritorial statute, allowing litigants to bring U.S. claims and obtain injunctions against defendants over infringing acts abroad.

She added that SCOTUS’s unanimous decision changes the landscape for cross-border cases entirely. By ruling that the Lanham Act’s infringement provisions are not extraterritorial, the Supreme Court has curtailed their application to only domestic uses, meaning the defendant’s use in commerce of the plaintiff’s mark must be domestic.

Read the full article.