Logo Logic: New Jersey Turnpike Authority Sues Florida Pizza Joint Over Trademark Infringement

Movie stars, college football players, deposed dictators and now, the Garden State Parkway. Everybody has gotten very touchy about the value of their image, likeness, data, look and feel.

The specific issue at hand involves Jersey Boardwalk Pizza, a small business in southern Florida with a couple of pizza joints. The antagonist is The New Jersey Turnpike Authority, owner and operator of the Garden State Parkway, one of most famous by-ways in well, the northeastern Middle Atlantic states. A broader audience, such as those who followed TV shows like The Sopranos or Jersey Shore may know that the Garden State is how most people get to the Jersey Shore, but the highway's ostensible charms are probably lost on most of the world's population.

Now the interesting thing about this case is that it may actually have global implications. Anyone familiar with how logos like those of Starbucks, Apple and Mercedes are tweaked slightly in various parts of the world - though China and India, we're looking mostly at you - and then presented as legally defensible marques. This requires a fair amount of cynicism and a relationship with regulatory authorities that might or might withstand scrutiny.

But the larger point is that despite lawyerly claims of product differentiation, consumer understanding and corporate innocence, in a developed world in which household has stagnated and in a developing world where it has yet to attain aspirational heights, there is an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of what constitutes intangible value. Information may want to be free but its owners want to be paid. JL

Emily Babay reports in Philly.com:

"Given the very distinct difference in the goods and services offered by our respective clients (yours being a governmental agency providing highway maintenance and travel related services exclusively in the state of New Jersey -- ours being a franchisor providing delicious pizza), there is no plausible likelihood of confusion,"
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The New Jersey Turnpike Authority has filed a lawsuit to get a Florida pizza company to stop using logos similar to Garden State Parkway signs.
The suit, filed this week in federal court in Newark, claims Jersey Boardwalk Pizza is infringing on the authority's service marks with its signage online and at its Tavernier and Florida City, Fla., shops.
The agency says Jersey Boardwalk Pizza's green and yellow logos are "virtually identical" to the "iconic" Garden State Parkway logo. The company is making money off the logos using the highway's logo to attract customers, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit says the Garden State Parkway logo "has acquired substantial consumer recognition and goodwill and has achieved the status of being a famous mark."

The pizza shops, according to the suit, "blatantly copy and appropriate" the logos, a move "likely to cause confusion, mistake or deception as to the source or origin of Defendants' services."
In an email included in the lawsuit filing, an attorney for the pizza company says the logos are unlikely to cause confusion.
"Given the very distinct difference in the goods and services offered by our respective clients (yours being a governmental agency providing highway maintenance and travel related services exclusively in the state of New Jersey -- ours being a franchisor of pizza restaurants providing the opportunity to provide delicious pizza and Italian food to patrons of its licensed restaurants), there is no plausible likelihood of confusion," JoyAnn Kenny wrote in response to a cease-and-desist letter sent in April.
Kenny calls the turnpike authority's pursuit of the pizza company "an unnecessary, fruitless and unwarranted waste of public resources."