united-states trademark corporate-law commerce online
Pulled off Amazon on a specious trademark claim
<p>Selling products on Amazon, I've had a listing pulled over &quot;trademark violation&quot; for mentioning that an HVAC sets come with acme fittings and/or acme adapters.</p>
<p>Is there any way that this trademark hit is actually valid given that acme/Acme/ACME fittings are a 127 year old product from a defunct company (<a href="http://vintagemachinery.org/mfgindex/detail.aspx?id=2096" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Acme Screw Machine Co.</a> of Hartford, Connecticut) that has been a national <a href="https://willrich.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ANSI-ASME-B1.5-Acme-standard.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ANSI/ASME standard</a> for nearly 9 decades and are used generically across the entire field of mechanical engineering?</p>
<p>Absolutely nothing else on Google or even Amazon seems to support that, Bourn &amp; Koch (ASMC's ultimate descendent company) seem to have let their National Acme trademarks expire, everyone else seems to be using it with impunity, and there's not even any other good term anyone would recognize for these parts. Any idea what's going on here? or do <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapezoidal_thread_form" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wikipedia's page</a> and the <a href="https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/1620" rel="nofollow noreferrer">OED</a> need to be updated that there's somehow still an active trademark involved here?</p>

<p>Even if &quot;acme&quot; were a currently active company with active trademarks, mentioning compatibility with another product is a classic example of nominative use and is not infringement unless a reasonable person would infer endorsement, support or approval. This does not sound like a valid reason to me.</p>
<p>On the other hand, amazon can probably decide to pull listings for any reason or none, valid or not.</p>
