The US Patent and Trademark Office rejected a trademark application for the word "spectacles" in relation to the company's Wearable of the same name. In a complaint spotted by The Verge, the company claims that its use of the term "corrective eyewear" is incongruous with its use of the term "smart glasses"
The complaint stems from a disagreement between the US Patent and Trademark Office and Snap over whether the term "spectacles" can be applied to any pair of smart glasses. In an opinion published in November, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board said that the use of Spectacles had failed to acquire the distinctiveness necessary for a trademark. Spectacles is often used to describe the nature of the product or competing products, rather than any particular source of the product. The appeal board's decision was overturned by the lawsuit.
The first-generation model of Spectacles was released in the same year as the first trademark filing. The Wearable was a flop despite a clever marketing campaign. Thousands of unsold pairs were collected in Chinese warehouses. Even after losing $40 million on the first version, it went on to release two new models and recently debut a pair of augmented reality Spectacles.
Consumers have come to associate the word "spectacles" with its brand due to social media marketing and word of mouth, a claim the USPTO disputes. The agency wrote in November that Spectacles had an "underwhelmed number of followers and a surprisingly small number of followers."
