This term, the Supreme Court is hearing several important copyright and trademark cases. One of the hot cases in trademark circles is , No. 19-46 (US 2020). The BPLA, via the and Trademarks and Unfair Competition Committees, submitted an brief supporting Booking.com. You can find the BPLA’s brief . In , the USPTO refused to register the mark “Booking.com” as generic. On appeal to the district court, Booking.com submitted survey evidence showing that consumers regarded the mark as a source identifier (, a functioning trademark) rather than as a generic term, and the district court reversed the USPTO. The Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit affirmed. In the Supreme Court, the USPTO and its argued that adding a generic top level domain identifier like “.com” to a generic term like “Booking” does not convert a generic term to a proper trademark. The BPLA argued that the USPTO was asking the wrong question. The question is not whether adding one generic term to another can ever create a non-generic mark. Rather, the correct question is what is the commercial impression of the mark as a whole. The BPLA further argued that the USPTO cannot ignore survey evidence on the commercial impression that the mark as a whole makes on consumers. Erik Belt, Lori Shyavitz, Susan Goldsmith, Anne Shannon, and Alex Ried, all of McCarter & English, LLP, wrote the brief.