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4  PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE v. BOOKING.COM B. V. 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

“only indicates that parties have formed an association or 
partnership  to  deal  in  such  goods.”    Id.,  at  602.    For  in-
stance, “parties united to produce or sell wine, or to raise
cotton  or  grain,”  may  well  “style  themselves  Wine  Com-
pany, Cotton Company, or Grain Company.”  Ibid.  But they
would not thereby gain the right to exclude others from the
use of those terms “for the obvious reason that all persons 
have a right to deal in such articles, and to publish the fact 
to the world.”  Id., at 603.  “[I]ncorporation of a company in
the name of an article of commerce, without other specifica-
tion,” we concluded, does not “create any exclusive right to 
the use of the name.”  Ibid. 

I  cannot  agree  with  respondent  that  the  1946  Lanham
Act “repudiate[d] Goodyear and its ilk.”  Brief for Respond-
ent 39.  It is true that the Lanham Act altered the common 
law in certain important respects.  Most significantly, it ex-
tended  trademark  protection  to  descriptive  marks  that 
have acquired secondary meaning.  See Qualitex Co. v. Ja-
cobson Products Co., 514 U. S. 159, 171 (1995).  But it did 
not disturb the basic principle that generic terms are ineli-
gible for trademark protection, and nothing in the Act sug-
gests  that  Congress  intended  to  overturn  Goodyear.  We 
normally assume that Congress did not overturn a common-
law principle absent some indication to the contrary.  See 
Astoria Fed. Sav. & Loan Assn. v. Solimino, 501 U. S. 104, 
108 (1991).  I can find no such indication here.  Perhaps that 
is why the lower courts, the Trademark Trial and Appeal
Board  (TTAB),  the  U. S.  Patent  and  Trademark  Office’s 
(PTO)  Trademark  Manual  of  Examining  Procedure 
(TMEP), and leading treatises all recognize Goodyear’s con-
tinued  validity.  See,  e.g.,  In re  Detroit  Athletic  Co.,  903 
F. 3d 1297, 1304 (CA Fed. 2018); In re Katch, LLC, 2019 WL 
2560528, *10 (TTAB 2019); TMEP §§1209.03(d) (Oct. 2018);
2 McCarthy §12:39; 4 L. Altman & M. Pollack, Callmann on
Unfair  Competition,  Trademarks  and  Monopolies  §18:11 
(4th ed., June 2020 update).