Summary
Explaining the "use in commerce" requirement for U.S. trademark registration.
In the United States, for (most) trademarks to be registered, they must be used “in commerce” that the U.S. Congress may lawfully regulate. This can be a tricky topic, even for lawyers who do a lot of this work, especially since Congress seems to have pretty broad authority to regulate commerce. The clearest examples are interstate commerce or commerce between the United States and another country. This is usually easy enough to show where goods are crossing state lines, or where customers are coming from out of state. Interestingly, and as the USPTO points out, “[i]n some cases, services such as restaurant and hotel services have been deemed to be rendered in commerce because they are activities that have been found to be within the scope of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which, like the Trademark Act, is predicated on the commerce clause.”