abercrombie

Determine the Abercrombie classification for a mark/product pair.

Source: Neel Guha

Size (samples): 99

Legal reasoning type: Rule-application/Rule-conclusion

Task type: 5-way classification

Task description

A particular mark (e.g. a name for a product or service) is only eligible for trademark protection if it is considered to be distinctive. In assessing whether a mark is distinctive, lawyers and judges follow the framework set out in the case Abercrombie & Fitch Co. v. Hunting World, Inc., which enumerates 5 categories of distinctiveness. These categories characterize the relationship between the dictionary definition of the term used in the mark, and the service or product it is being attached to.

Generic: Generic terms are those which connote the basic nature of articles or services, rather than the more individualized characteristics of a product.
Descriptive: Descriptive terms identify a characteristic or quality of an article or service, such as color, odor, function, dimensions, or ingredients.
Suggestive: A suggestive term suggests, rather than describes, some particular characteristic of the goods or services to which it applies. It requires to consumer to exercise the imagination in order to draw a conclusion as to the nature of the goods and services.
Arbitrary: Arbitrary terms are those that are real words, but arbitrary with respect to the product.
Fanciful: Fanciful terms are those that are entirely made up, and not found in the English dictionary.

Dataset construction

We manually create a dataset to evaluate a model’s ability to classify a mark’s distinctiveness (into one of the above 5 categories) with respect to a product. In writing samples, we draw inspiration from similar exercises available in legal casebooks and online resources. We create 20 samples for each category of distinctiveness, and randomly select a single sample from each category to constitute the train set. The remaining 19 samples (for each category) are assigned to the test set (for a total of 95 samples).