4 September—Readers who have visited FU-CT.com and/or read the essay that gave rise to the FU,CT! phenomenon may recall the antepenultimate paragraph:

“It must be noted that the United States Supreme Court in 2019 ordered the Patent and Trademark Office to approve “FUCT” as the brand name of a line of clothing. So, even though deleting the comma would without doubt sharpen the point of our incisive acronym by reminding Connecticut taxpayers and gun owners of the pain they’ve been suffering far too long, the comma must nevertheless be included at all times in order to foreclose litigation for trademark infringement.”

Well, Erik Brunetti, the shmata entrepreneur who beat the Patent and Trademark Office on FUCT (an acronym for Friends U Can’t Trust, to be sure) six years ago, has beaten the PTO once again—but so far only at the federal appellate level—on FUCK (Friends U Can’t Kiss? Friends U Can’t Kick? Friends U Can’t Know?).

It appears that given his success with FUCT, Brunetti applied to the PTO to register the word FUCK as a trademark for various goods and services. Since, after SCOTUS found that refusing registration for being “immoral or scandalous” was unconstitutional, the folks at the PTO instead refused registration on the ground that FUCK was a “commonplace term” used to convey emotions rather than “source identification.”

It’s no surprise that the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, an allegedly neutral so-called adjudicative body within the PTO, affirmed that refusal in 2022. While not ruling that FUCK was unregistrable in all contexts, the TTAB’s rationale was that it was an “all-purpose word” with “many recognized meanings,” so that in Brunetti’s specific applications, consumers would see FUCK as conveying sentiments rather than identifying his products from other (presumably untrademarked) products from other sources.

The TTAB also dismissed Brunetti’s reliance on other registered trademarks as well as his constitutional arguments, maintaining that each application must be considered on its own merits.

On appeal, then, in a two-to-one decision, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, while rejecting most of Brunetti’s arguments, nevertheless found that the TTAB failed to articulate a “clear and rational standard” for when a ubiquitous and versatile word like FUCK can or cannot function as a trademark—especially given the existence of similar trademarks (like FUCT).

So the circuit vacated the TTAB’s decision and remanded the case, holding that it must provide “coherent guidance” as well as satisfactory explanations for its actions.

It must be noted that FUCK appears in the court’s majority decision but that Judge Alan Lourie’s brief written dissent—on the very procedural grounds the majority found for Brunetti—sidesteps the word’s appearance through the usual means, i.e., “the f-word” and “f.”

For all the reasons the Patent and Trademark Office and Trademark Trial and Appeal Board stated and the three Federal Circuit judges agreed with, FUCK must not be a registered trademark. It is and should be in the public domain. Anybody who wants to call any product or service FUCK must be allowed to. And that’s all there is to it.

Here’s the link to the appellate opinion:

https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/23-1539.OPINION.8-26-2025_2563636.pdf