Foursquare Has Been Trying (And Failing) To Trademark “Check-In”

You'd be hard-pressed to find a hotter term in technology right now than "check-in." Following Facebook's entry into the location space with Places, it will soon be a term that hundreds of million of web users know well. But millions already do know it well thanks to Foursquare . While it seems likely that they weren't the first to use it, they are the ones that made it ubiquitous among the location-based services. As such, they've been trying to apply for a trademark on the term. Foursquare (technically Foursquare Labs, Inc.) filed the trademark application on March 11 of this year. But in June, the USPTO turned down the trademark request stating that " the applied-for mark, as used on the specimen of record, is merely informational matter; it does not function as a service mark to identify and distinguish applicant’s services from those of others and to indicate the source of applicant’s services. "