STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Today the United States Supreme Court considers just what you can trademark. Most familiar names and logos are registered trademarks, from the McDonald's golden arches to the apple on an iPhone.
RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In the last two decades, the federal Patent and Trademark Office has approved roughly 4 million of them. That helps businesses protect their ownership rights, but there's a limit to what they can do.
INSKEEP: A federal law says you may not register a trademark that disparages a group or individual, and that is the law that's before the court today.
Be warned. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg's report, which runs about five minutes, does contain terms that people find offensive.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Disparage is a nice-sounding legal word, but be forewarned, there is no way to tell this story without some offensive language. The protagonist here is an Asian-American band called The Slants.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SAKURA, SAKURA")
THE SLANTS: (Singing) For the Japanese and the Chinese and...
TOTENBERG: The band members picked that name precisely because it is offensive to many Asian-Americans, a cliche about Asian eyes. Simon Tam is the group's frontman.
SIMON TAM: We could turn this phrase upside down, flip it on its head and kind of re-appropriate it to something that's positive and about self-empowerment.
TOTENBERG: Now, there's nothing to stop The Slants from trademarking their group. But when they went to get the extra protections afforded by registering the name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, they were turned down under a section of the 1946 federal law that bars registration of trademarks that, quote, "disparage or bring into contempt or disrepute persons, institutions, beliefs or national symbols."
Thus, for example, the trademark office has denied registration to a group calling itself Abort the Republicans and another called Democrats Shouldn't Breed. It recently canceled the registration for the Washington Redskins at the behest of some Native American groups who said the name was offensive to them. But while the Washington football team will survive regardless, The Slants say they really need the registration.
TAM: If you want a record label deal, oftentimes companies will not sign with you unless you have a registered trademark.
TOTENBERG: And the band points to lots of other registered groups that are viewed by some as offensive, like the rap group NWA, which stands for Niggaz Wit Attitudes. So The Slants went to court, contending that the denial of trademark registration violated their free speech rights.
ILYA SHAPIRO: Does the government get to decide what's a slur?
TOTENBERG: Ilya Shapiro of the libertarian Cato Institute.
SHAPIRO: It shouldn't be the government that makes that call.
TOTENBERG: The government counters that it's not doing anything to stop The Slants from speaking or calling themselves anything they want. But as the government sees it, if it's going to give its imprimatur to a name, the law appropriately forbids disparagement. Otherwise, the federal government would be required to register, publish and transmit to foreign countries marks containing crude references to women's anatomy, repellent racial slurs, white supremacist slogans and demeaning illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad and other religious figures. Cato's Shapiro has a different view.
SHAPIRO: Surely it's not the case that the government endorses every trademark that it registers. There are a lot of crazy trademarks out there. Is the government saying that it endorses the idea of Take Yo Panties Off or Capitalism Sucks Donkey Balls? And those are some of the tamer ones.
TOTENBERG: Georgetown Law professor Rebecca Tushnet replies that once the government creates a program, it usually is allowed a fair amount of control over it.
REBECCA TUSHNET: And preventing the government from even seeming to officially endorse discriminatory or disparaging terms is probably a good enough reason, as long as the government never punishes someone for using that disparaging term elsewhere.
TOTENBERG: Indeed, the government points to other Supreme Court decisions that have upheld similar programs. The ban on discussions about abortion in programs that get government grants or the 2015 decision upholding the Texas ban on specialty license plates. But Ilya Shapiro maintains there's a difference in the trademark registration case because the government is not providing any subsidy. Moreover, he contends, the trademark disparagement provision is unconstitutionally vague with insufficient criteria.
SHAPIRO: Vagueness means that a law doesn't give enough instruction to citizens about how to follow the law. What is disparaging? It depends on the particular trademark examiner that you get or the particular judge.
TOTENBERG: Rebecca Tushnet replies that in a program with 500,000 applications for trademark registration each year, there will inevitably be some inconsistencies, just as there are in the judgments made under the other parts of the law and other laws. In each case, she observes, if you get turned down for a trademark registration, you can appeal within the agency. And if you lose there, you can go to court. But she adds that the trademark registration system has served the nation well.
TUSHNET: It's a complex system, and if you pull out a chunk of it without extreme care, you're going to upset the rest of the system.
TOTENBERG: And that, she says, could put the whole trademark system in jeopardy. As for The Slants, they're enjoying their current legal fame. But as guitarist Joe Jiang puts it...
JOE JIANG: We're going to keep playing music 'cause that's what we were first. We're musicians first.
TOTENBERG: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FROM THE HEART")
THE SLANTS: (Singing) Sorry if our notes are too sharp. Sorry if our voice is too raw. Don't make the pen a weapon and censor our intelligence until our thoughts mean nothing at all. Sorry if you take offense. You made up rules and played pretend. We know you fear change. It's something so strange. But nothing...