By Gwen Wei

Does anybody remember how B&B Hardware v. Hargis Industries started anymore?

B&B Hardware is a labyrinthine case grown out of simple roots: in 1993, B&B Hardware (“B&B”) trademarked “Sealtight”. Hargis Industries (“Hargis”) applied for a trademark on “Sealtite” in 1996. When B&B opposed Hargis’s application, Hargis sought to have B&B’s trademark cancelled. B&B retorted with a suit for infringement. This eventually led to a brief wrangle before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“TTAB”), where the board found there was a likelihood of confusion between the two marks. But retelling the full twenty years of its litigious history, as Justice Alito later remarked, could fill a long, unhappy book.  Over the decades, B&B Hardware has devolved into a slapfest as the case was dismissed and refiled and remanded, surging all the way to the Supreme Court and back again. The case’s significance no longer lies in its eventual final verdict—whether B&B or Hargis gets to seal the deal, as it were—but in the precedent that it sets.

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