After its launch in 2010, Pinterest, a service that allows users to create a kind of online scrapbook, quickly became one of the Valley's hottest startups. In 2013, Pinterest sued a much smaller company called Pintrips, whose travel-planning program monitors flight prices, saying it infringed Pinterest's trademark. In its complaint (PDF), Pinterest sought unspecified damages and a court order that would have forced Pintrips to change its name.

After two years of litigation and a bench trial in May, Pintrips has come out on top. In a 44-page order (PDF) issued yesterday, US District Judge Haywood Gilliam found in Pintrips' favor on every cause of action.

He blasted two Pinterest surveys that purported to show consumer confusion. Of the first, Gilliam said it was "impossible to disaggregate" survey respondents who were influenced by the Pintrips name alone from those who were thinking about its "pin button" or "pinning functionality."

The term "pin" is a verb that has a widely understood meaning, and Pintrips has a fair use right to use it, Gilliam found. "Pintrips uses the term pin in the exact same way as Microsoft, Facebook, and the many other companies that have come before it: as a verb for attaching one virtual object to another," he wrote.

Pintrips founder Stephen Gotlieb initially called the service "Flightrax" and created a mockup as a project for his MBA program in January 2011. The name Pintrips was thought up later that year by a team member who hadn't yet heard of Pinterest, which was still an invitation-only website at that time.

Gilliam also threw out Pinterest's claim of trademark dilution, finding that the website didn't qualify as a "famous mark" in 2011, nor even in 2012, when it had millions of users.

Fundamentally, the two companies are in different businesses. "Pinterest has no travel booking function; is not working on a travel booking function; and has no concrete plan to begin working on a travel booking function in the future," Gilliam wrote.

"This ruling is based on Pintrips' ability to convince the court they hadn't heard of Pinterest in 2011," said a Pinterest spokesperson via e-mail. "While we're disappointed in that conclusion, it doesn't have any implications for our marks today or the future."

"Words like ‘pin’ and ‘pinning’ have become part of the Internet’s terminology, much like ‘trash,’ and “You Have Mail’ did years ago," Pintrips lawyer Edward Colbert said. "This case confirms that any company may use those words for their ordinary meaning and prevents a large company with significant assets from trying to seize control of a commonly used word that is part of our everyday culture."