Court Opinion

ID: 9484272
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:46:35.168265+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:07.998666
License: Public Domain

FRIEDMAN, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I join Judge Michel’s opinion for the court. I write separately to explain why I believe the court correctly declines (footnote 3) to reach the issue on which the dissent would decide the case, namely, whether an applicant for trademark registration in the United States based upon foreign registration of the mark is required to show prior use of the mark for the goods for which registration is sought. The court should not reach out to decide an issue that the litigants did not raise before the Board, that the Board did not decide, and that the appellant did not argue to us.
1. The only issue before the Board was whether the mark “French Line” was unreg-*846istrable because it was “primarily geographically descriptive.” The sole basis upon which the Board affirmed the Trademark Examining Attorney’s refusal to register the mark was that “if applicant’s goods in fact come from France, we believe applicant’s mark is primarily geographically descriptive of the source of those goods and services, and that if those goods and services do not come from France, then the mark would be primarily geographically deceptively misdeseriptive.”
In their initial briefs before this court, the parties similarly argued only whether the mark was primarily geographically descriptive. That was the only issue presented at oral argument, until the court asked whether the application was defective because it did not assert prior use of the mark. In response to the court’s request, after argument each party filed a supplemental brief addressing that issue. The appellant argued briefly that such use was not required. The Commissioner’s brief presented argument on both sides of the question, but took no position on it. These supplemental filings cannot properly be viewed as an injection by the parties of the issue into the case.
“The grounds upon which an administrative order must be judged are those upon which the record discloses that its action was based.” Securities & Exchange Comm’n v. Chenery Corp., 318 U.S. 80, 87, 63 S.Ct. 454, 459, 87 L.Ed. 626 (1943). A reviewing court cannot affirm an agency on a ground other than that the agency gave. Id. at 95, 63 S.Ct. at 462 (“an administrative order cannot be upheld unless the grounds upon which the agency acted in exercising its powers were those upon which its action can be sustained”). The same reasoning should also dictate that a reviewing court should not refuse to uphold the result an agency reached, on the ground that the agency’s prior decision, upon which the decision under review rests, was itself erroneous.
I recognize that under the practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, there is little likelihood that the validity of the Board’s position that prior use need not be shown to obtain United States registration of a trademark based upon a foreign registration, would be directly presented to this court. That consideration, however, does not justify the court in reaching out to decide an issue not raised before it. Although an appellate court always may notice plain error, even though not raised before it, the Board’s error that the dissent discerns in this case is not of that kind.
In these circumstances, any change in the Board’s position should be made by Congress. Congress apparently has done that in the Trademark Law Revision Act of 1988, discussed briefly below.
The dissent’s position is in stark contrast with what the court did in the Crocker case. There, an augmented eight-member Board panel first decided that prior use need not be asserted when United States registration was sought based on a foreign registration. A regular three-member Board panel then refused registration because there was a likelihood of confusion between the two marks involved. On appeal, the only issue the parties raised was likelihood of confusion, and this court affirmed the Board on that issue without consideration of the augmented panel’s ruling, made at an earlier stage of the same case, on the use issue. Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce v. Wells Fargo Bank, 811 F.2d 1490, 1 USPQ2d 1813 (Fed.Cir.1987). I do not understand why, if the court in that case limited its decision to the issue the parties presented to it, it should not follow the same course here. If, as the dissent now argues, the Crocker prior use ruling was erroneous, one would think that the court contemporaneously reviewing the second Crocker decision would have corrected that error.
A further consideration against deciding the prior use issue in this case is that for the future the issue is likely to have limited, if any, significance. Under the Trademark Law Revision Act, Pub.L. No. 100-667, Title I, § 133(4), 102 Stat. 3935, 3946 (1988), an applicant seeking registration based on a foreign registration must show that it “has a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce.” 15 U.S.C. § 1126(d)(2) (1988). I doubt that, in the face of this change in the statute, the Board will continue to apply the Crocker rule.
*8472. The dissent argues, however, that the Board had no jurisdiction to consider the application because the application’s failure to allege prior use of the mark rendered the application invalid, that a court always may— indeed, must — consider the jurisdiction of the tribunal the decision of which it reviews, and that the Board’s lack of jurisdiction deprives us of jurisdiction to decide the merits, I cannot conclude, however, that the Board lacked jurisdiction in this case.
The question the dissent addresses is one of statutory interpretation: Whether the Lanham Act requires an application for trademark registration in the United States based upon foreign registration of the mark to show prior use of the mark. The dissent’s conclusion that the Act requires that showing does not establish that without that showing the Board had no “jurisdiction” in the case. “The term ‘jurisdiction’ ... is a verbal coat of ... many colors.” International Longshoremen’s Ass’n v. Davis, 476 U.S. 380, 402, 106 S.Ct. 1904, 1918, 90 L.Ed.2d 389 (1986) (Rehnquist, J.) (quoting United States v. Tucker Truck Lines, Inc., 344 U.S. 33, 39, 73 S.Ct. 67, 70, 97 L.Ed. 54 (1952) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)). The dissent’s conclusion that the applicant may not have met the statutory requirements for registration, so that the Board could not grant the application, does not mean that the Board had no jurisdiction in the case.