It's Judge Newsom, not Newsome

Judge Newsom has quickly become known as one of the more entertaining writers on the 11th Circuit.  He even makes IP litigation fun.  From the intro:

Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, a residential community in Boca Raton, Florida, is home to multimillion-dollar mansions, a championship golf course, and even a private marina. It’s also home, as it turns out, to the contentious real-estate rivalry that spawned this trademark litigation.
Royal Palm Properties, a real-estate broker whose specialty is buying and selling homes in Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club, sued its competitor, Pink Palm Properties, for infringing its registered service mark on the phrase “Royal Palm Properties.” Pink Palm Properties counterclaimed, challenging the mark’s validity. A jury in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida upheld Royal Palm Properties’ mark but found that Pink Palm Properties hadn’t infringed it. The district court, though, overturned the verdict in part, granting Pink Palm Properties’ renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law and ordering the cancellation of Royal Palm Properties’ mark. The question before us is whether the district court correctly flipped the jury’s verdict and granted judgment as a matter of law on Pink Palm Properties’ trademark-invalidation counterclaim.

We hold that the district court erred. To be entitled to judgment as a matter of law, Pink Palm Properties would have had to make quite the showing at trial—such that no reasonable jury could have found that it failed to prove grounds for cancelling Royal Palm Properties’ mark. Based on our careful review of the record, we conclude that Pink Palm Properties didn’t meet this high bar. On neither of its two grounds for cancellation—that the “Royal Palm Properties” mark (1) is not “distinctive” and (2) is “confusingly similar” to previously registered marks—did Pink Palm Properties prove, decisively, that it had won the day. We therefore reverse the district court’s decision to overturn the jury’s verdict and invalidate Royal Palm Properties’ service mark.

I enjoyed this discussion and the footnote especially:*

Pink Palm Properties certainly satisfied the first two Coach House requirements. The “Royal Palm Properties” mark clearly “resembles” the “Royale Palms” marks—the spelling of the dominant words is nearly identical8—and the “Royale Palms” marks were registered several years before the “Royal Palm Properties” mark.

8.Welcome to the author’s life. Compare “Newsom” with “Newsome.”

* Welcome to this author's life as well.  Compare "Markus" with "Marcus."