Forty-eight years ago today, one of the most celebrated and venerable marques in automotive history was first registered as a trademark in the United States. On December 31, 1968, history was made when U.S. Registration No. 862632 was granted to Italian automaker Ferrari S.p.A. for the FERRARI prancing horse logo for “automobiles.” A second FERRARI logo was registered in 1969 as U.S. Registration No. 874164. Both registrations are still in force today, and both logos are still in use nearly five decades later. Interestingly (to trademark nerds, anyway), while the FERRARI logo trademarks were first registered in the U.S. in the late 1960s, the name FERRARI was apparently not registered as a standard character mark for automobiles in the U.S. until 2004, thirty-six years later.

By Axion23 (Ferrari Emblem) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.