IP Law Daily, TRADEMARK—Summary judgment is denied for direct trademark infringement claims regarding bingo generator, (May 5, 2026)

By Steven Melendez

A court denied summary judgment for a workplace safety company suing a bingo card generator website and dismissed a contributory infringement claim.

A judge declined to grant summary judgment for Safety Star LLC, which sells workplace safety awareness products including bingo games, against the operator of a bingo card generator website which Safety Star says directly infringes its trademarks. The judge also dismissed a contributory infringement claim brought by Safety Star against Aptibyte LLC, the website operator, saying it hadn’t proven third-party infringers used the trademarks in commerce (Safety Star LLC v. Aptibyte LLC, No. 2:23-cv-01399-DWC (W.D. Wash. May 4, 2026)).

Background. Safety Star manufactures and sells safety bingo products under the trademarks B-SAFE and B-SAFE BINGO and owns valid U.S. trademark registrations for those marks. The company alleges Aptibyte infringes its trademarks as it created and distributed bingo cards using the trademarks on its “Bingo Baker” website.

Safety Star owner and managing member Albert Culbertson created the B-SAFE bingo card in 1992, and it’s subsequently evolved into a larger “B-SAFE Bingo Program” with a set of rules, a bingo ball turner, bingo cards, and other equipment. Culbertson formed Safety Star, which sells B-SAFE bingo products online, in 2002. The company doesn’t sell B-SAFE bingo products anywhere besides its website, which it advertises through Google Ads, and doesn’t sell digital versions of the cards, according to the ruling in the case.

Aptibyte owns and operates a “Bingo Baker” website, which lets users create bingo cards with content of their choice to play online or print out. Aptibyte managing member Matt Johnson says bingo card creators can decide whether their bingo cards should be public—“viewable by anyone and indexed by search engines”—or “hidden” and only accessible to people provided with the URL, or “private” and only accessible to the card creator.

Aptibyte sells memberships in the Bingo Baker website which include access to those privacy settings, rather than simply the ability to make public cards, and online gameplay features. The company denies that it ever used any of the Safety Star marks “in connection with Aptibyte’s promotion or memberships to the Bingo Baker website” and says it doesn’t use any advertising for the site or allow advertising on it.

Culbertson allegedly did a Google search for safety bingo in 2019 or 2020 and found Safety Star B-SAFE bingo cards and Aptibyte B-SAFE bingo cards “next to each other in the search results,” according to the ruling. Johnson said when he was notified of the allegedly infringing cards, he replaced “bsafe” with “safety” or “bingo” in the card text or removed them, according to the ruling, but said he didn’t plan to include “bsafe” on a restricted word list to prevent other users from making cards with that text.

Johnson said a total of 1,071 user-created cards from 2012 through 2016 included “bsafe” in the card content, and only 69 users have both purchased a membership and created such cards. But Culbertson claims that “Aptibyte posts BSAFE bingo cards to the Bingo Baker website and uses the BSAFE bingo cards to acquire more subscribers” and that Safety Star has lost business because of the alleged infringement.

On February 27, 2026, the parties filed motions for summary judgment. Safety Star asserted Aptibyte is liable for direct and contributory trademark infringement and that it should be awarded damages, while Aptibyte argued for summary judgment in its own favor.

Direct infringement. The parties at this stage don’t dispute that Safety Star has a valid and protectable trademark, according to the ruling.

To show direct infringement, Safety Star must also show the marks were used by Aptibyte and commerce, and “undisputed evidence shows the Bingo Baker website is commercial in nature,” according to the ruling, selling premium memberships. Evidence also shows the B-SAFE trademarks appear connected with Aptibyte’s website in Google searches, and non-members must make their generated cards public and searchable. “Thus, while Aptibyte did not explicitly advertise the B-SAFE Trademarks on the Bingo Baker website, Aptibyte required non-paying customers to publicize bingo cards that used the B-SAFE Trademarks and linked bingo cards that contained the B-SAFE Trademarks to the Bingo Baker website,” according to the ruling.

But there is also evidence that “Aptibyte did not sell the B-SAFE Trademarks for advertising and did not advertise the B-SAFE Trademarks on the Baker Bingo website,” with the court finding a question of fact exists as to whether Aptibyte meets the “use in commerce” requirement for trademark infringement.

To show infringement, Safety Star also must show likelihood of confusion. The court noted that both sets of cards are safety bingo cards available online, they appear next to each other in search results, the marks are nearly identical and the products are similar, and the cards are of low value at just 11 cents per card, with “no evidence a reasonably prudent consumer would take time to distinguish between the two different safety bingo cards.”

But there’s dispute as to whether Aptibyte used the trademark with intent to confuse, which a jury might consider weighing against likelihood of confusion, and “evidence related to marketing channels is limited,” according to the ruling. The ruling noted that users harnessing generic search terms like those that bring up both websites are generally searching for product categories, not specific products, and can be less susceptible to confusion. Additionally, there’s no evidence of actual consumer confusion.

“Finally, the evidence presented, Culbertson’s deposition and screenshots of Google searches and the Bingo Baker website, requires the Court to step, however slight, into a role of determining facts that should be decided by a jury,” the court found, declining to issue summary judgment for Safety Star.

Contributory infringement. Contributory infringement requires trademark infringement by a third party. Safety Star has provided evidence that a bingo card creator used Bingo Baker to make a bingo card including “bsafe” for “internal workplace training,” but there’s no evidence the cards were used in connection with commercial transactions.

“At most, a third-party infringer was allowing an infringing bingo card to be searchable on the internet; however, unlike Aptibyte, a reasonable juror could not conclude the third-party infringer was attempting to publish the infringing card for sales, distribution, or advertising,” according to the ruling. “Therefore, the record does not reflect third-party infringers used the infringing bingo cards in commerce.”

Since Safety Star failed to show direct infringement by a third party, the court granted summary judgement to Aptibyte on the contributory infringement claim.

Damages. Aptibyte argued that Safety Star’s claims on damages are too speculative. Safety Star “presented evidence of lost profits since the B-SAFE Trademarks have been used” on the Aptibyte site and “r calculated the average number of bingo cards printed by a Safety Star customer from 2020 to the present multiplied by the number of people who used Safety Star cards from Aptibyte from 2020 to the present multiplied by the average price of a BSAFE bingo card.”

The court found “Safety Star has provided more than speculative evidence to support its damages theory at this stage,” ruling that damages should be decided by the trier of fact and denying summary judgment as to damages.

The Case is No. 2:23-cv-01399-DWC.

Judge: Christel, D.

Attorneys: Timothy J. Billick (Practus LLP) for Safety Star LLC. Randall Moeller (Focal PLLC) for Aptibyte LLC.

Companies: Safety Star LLC; Aptibyte LLC

Cases: Trademark WashingtonNews