I found no live trademark registrations when I search for “Planescape” trademarks on Justia’s search and the USPTO search. So it was confusing to see artwork that shows a registered trademark symbol on the new Planescape book. But yesterday I found a website that claimed there was a “PLANESCAPE” trademark.
Apparently WOTC does have a live registered trademark for Planescape - except the registration’s word mark is misspelled as “PLANE SCAPE” for some reason. (Word marks are supposed to be inputted as all capitals, I believe, when being registered as a trademark. The error is in the word mark’s space when the logo and official marketing material spell Planescape as only one word with no spaces.)
https://ttrpg.network/pictrs/image/c09b2564-5e5a-4169-946f-7299c326e677.jpeg
So for anyone finding no live trademark registration results for “Planescape” (thus believing that book shouldn’t have a registered trademark symbol on it), this must be why. Maybe you should contact their lawyer team and tell them that the word mark in the registration is misspelled.
Of course, I’m not a lawyer, so don’t contact me about stuff like this. This was just an accidental discovery.
I don’t think this is a mistake.
When the setting was first released it was styled Plane Scape and though has subsequently been used as Planescape the registration may date as far back as the initial early 90s.
Trademarks are a funny thing though, take Coca-Cola. If they register only COCA-COLA with the hyphen, that doesn’t allow Pepsi to make a sparkling brown sugar drink called Coca Cola. Intention is important in these matters, not just the technicality of what is registered. Registrations also allow for “stylisation”, which means you don’t need to register a new mark to stylise your existing mark.
The trademark would say Registered and Renewed if that was the case, because it would be far older than 10 years, and you need to renew trademarks at least once every about ten years. The current live trademark was only filed in 2016 and registered in 2020 according to this link. Besides, the image for the word mark uses the spelling with no spaces, so it’s not consistent.
https://trademarks.justia.com/871/69/planescape-87169146.html
I don’t know what the feed file is Justia, but the UK gov website has good feeds. https://trademarks.ipo.gov.uk/ipo-tmcase/page/Results/1/UK00900149922
Planescape (one word) was registered in 1996, added to the registry in 1998, and is not required to be renewed until 2026.
I don’t know if Justia is wrong or providing the info in such a way as to lead to confusion.
Justia works with US trademarks and law. In the US trademarks currently need to be renewed every 10 years - prior to the reduction in the late 1900s they appear to be needed to be renewed only every 20 years. I don’t live in the UK, so the apparent 30 year renew requirement is much longer.
Also it seems Wizards of the Coast were somehow able to keep their Planescape UK trademark registration intact despite letting every other Planescape related trademark registration become canceled/abandoned. I’m not sure if they had to keep up with the trademark, or if registrations in the UK last much longer without having to be kept up to date. I guess they let it lapse at the time in the US for some reason, but when they started Dungeon Master’s Guild, I think they realized they should have live registrations for the legacy setting names they had to have more power under the law to manage the use of them. I think a company would want to keep other companies in check when they’re licensing certain IPs to others.
There were different registrations, but they were canceled or abandoned. The only live one is from 2016…