delay of this sort is precisely what laches is designed to guard against Thru cannot simply “sleep on rights,” allowing multiple other parties to expend significant resources litigating over rights that Thru believes it owns, only to belatedly pursue the victorious party. If a trial resulted in a determination that Thru owned superior rights to the “dropbox” trademark, the costs to Dropbox would be massively greater today than they would have been years ago, because of Dropbox’s continued investment in its brand. Thru purposefully delayed bringing suit in an attempt to increase its leverage over Dropbox and thus the value of its claims. . . . More specifically, the court held that Thru’s delay was unreasonable and prejudiced Dropbox because:
The summary judgment decision, issued on Tuesday by Judge Edward Chen of the Northern District of California, agreed that Thru’s trademark infringement claim was barred by the doctrine of laches. Dropbox argued that Thru’s claim was barred by the doctrine of laches because Thru unreasonably delayed in making its claim and this delay prejudiced Dropbox. Later in proceedings, Dropbox moved for summary judgment on Thru’s counterclaim. Thru counterclaimed for trademark infringement, alleging that it had priority to the DROPBOX mark based on use as early as May 2004, and that Dropbox did not start using its DROPBOX mark until 2008. Last year, Dropbox filed a lawsuit against Thru, seeking declaratory relief that its use and registration of the DROPBOX trademark does not infringe upon Thru’s purported trademark rights. Thru did not file an opposition to Dropbox’s 2009 trademark application. Dropbox was ultimately successful on those oppositions and obtained its trademark registration for DROPBOX in 2014. (which has changed its name to Hightail), and others.
See the screenshot from their website below.ĭropbox filed a trademark application to register the DROPBOX mark in 2009, but was hit with a flurry of oppositions by other companies such as Officeware, the owner of the FilesAnywhere service, Yousendit, Inc. Thru operates a secure file sharing system called Thru Dropbox. The popular cloud storage system Dropbox recently won summary judgment against Thru, Inc.’s claim of trademark infringement.
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