In re Eastern National
Trademark Trial and Appeals Board
2001 WL 1547936 (2001)
Eastern National (plaintiff) applied to register "Independence Park Institute" as a trademark; the examining attorney denied the application as merely descriptive, citing some U.S. parks nicknamed "Independence Park" and 13 news stories using that nickname instead of a park's official name. Eastern National countered with 15 stories referring to other, different parks in other states as "Independence Park," contrasting this with a search for "Independence Hall," where only one specific building appeared in the first 50 results, and appealed the denial to the Trademark Trial and Appeals Board (TTAB).
Whether a proposed trademark is primarily geographically descriptive, and therefore unregistrable, when the geographic place-name it references is used inconsistently across multiple different locations and is not primarily associated by the public with any single specific place.