ASHEBORO, N.C. – A local bank has filed a trademark infringement suit against Truliant FCU and asked a federal court to bar the Winston-Salem credit union from using its ‘Yes you can’ service mark on billboards and other advertisements.
CommunityONE Bank, known until recently as First National Bank and Trust, said it purchased rights to the Yes you can service mark, as registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in 1999 from Crestar Bank. The service mark, says CommunityONE, is an extension of the bank’s corporate logo and its mascot, Jack, resembling a jumping jack.
Truliant, which is a competitor of CommunityONE, is using the Yes you can slogan and a sun logo that resembles the Jack logo, on at least two billboards which direct viewers to the credit union’s website, TruDifferences.org, according to the suit. One of the billboards is located on Interstate 40, near the Route 68 Interchange.
The CommunityONE ads read: Yes you can. The Power of Positive Banking.
The Truliant billboards read: Yes You Can Join Truliant!
The bank is asking the court to order Truliant to immediately pull the Yes you can ads and assess monetary damages to recover any losses of profits and to treble the damages. "As a direct result and proximate result of Truliant’s unlawful acts, CommunityONE has suffered and will continue to suffer injury to its business, goodwill and property in an amount not presently know," the Bank claims in its suit.
Truliant officials were unavailable over the weekend to comment.
