I think the "single letter" part is important here. AFAIK trademarks can't be too simple and generic. Sort of like how Intel couldn't trademark 286/386/486, so instead of 586 we got Pentium.

No, it's not important. It's just wrong, as clearly illustrated by the article we're all discussing.

Microsoft applied for, and obtained, a trademark for "x". Companies do this all the time. Companies also trademark numbers all the time. Dale Earnhardt trademarked the number "1": https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=75439039&caseType=SERIAL_...

Intel lost their trademark battle because they didn't attempt to register the trademark until the 486 - more than a decade after the numbers were in common use by other chip manufactures.

It has nothing to do with whether the mark is simple.

Are you sure it is the letter and not the graphic that is trademarked?

It does say "Standard Character Claim: No" which (as best I can tell from [1]) means it is the particular form of that letter[2], not the letter itself, which is trademarked.

[1] https://smallbusiness.chron.com/standard-character-claim-mea...

[2] Although it is a pretty generic "1".

The specimen on that application are clearly more than just the numeral ‘1’. There’s obviously design there. This does not appear to be equivalent.

I thought that Peugeot had a trademark on car models of the form X0Y (where X and Y were single digits), resulting in the Porsche 901 being renamed to the 911 that we now know.

Apple trademark the word Apple.

In this case the entire logo previously exists though.

I'm not sure similar cases exist but it's similar as using an old public domain logo as your own.

Now I'm curious where the original Apple logo came from…

(And now I know: designed by Ron Wayne, so not public domain at all; and I'd forgotten about the ribbons with the text)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_of_Apple_Inc.#/media...

Of course you can.

3M, Scotch, Crate & Barrel, Lufthansa and Jeep all have legitimate trademarked word marks that consist of nothing more than their name written in Helvetica.

That's a word mark... it doesn't matter what font it's in because the mark relates to the words, not a specific design of the words in display...

The word mark registers the word as a trademark.

The typographical and design treatment of the word can have separate trademark protection.

That can be true whether or not a design mark is registered.

If you started a car company called ‘Beep’ and write its name in olive green Helvetica Black, Jeep might struggle to make a case about your name’s similarity to their word mark (beep is a different word and rhyming is not a crime), but they for sure could take you to court for stealing their trade dress.

So rather than make the point that the use in helvetica is captured in the word mark (it isn't) you instead add trade dress into this??

Not in the word mark registration, sure. But registration is not the whole of trademark law is it?

‘Word mark’ is also just a term of art in graphic design referring to a logo consisting of just text - another word for logotype. Should I have said logotype instead?

It's captured in the trade dress - that's all you had to say. You don't have to say its captured in the word mark, because it isn't!

And every single one of those is in the Public Domain, because they don't meet the Threshold of Originality for copyright purposes.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3M_wordmark.svg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Scotch-logo.svg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crate_and_barrel_log...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lufthansa_Logo_2018....

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeep_logo.svg

For more info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordmark

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Threshold_of_orig...

Which is irrelevant to whether or not they are valid as trademarks