This article was contributed by Swastika Chakravarti.
How important are phonetics in trademarks, you ask? The General Court of the European Union has an answer for you. In deciding a matter between Pay TV giant, Sky and Microsoft (owners of Skype), the Court relied on the similarity of signs in terms of concept and phonetics to deny Microsoft a trademark for Skype in Europe. Holding that the pronunciation of ‘y’ in Skype is no shorter than in Sky, the Court…
This post was first published on 10th October, 2014.
The Doctrine of Foreign Equivalents is a rule used in the Trademark Law which states that a foreign word and its equivalent English translation may be deemed confusingly similar. Under this doctrine, marks consisting of or including foreign words or terms from common, modern languages are translated into English to determine the extent to which it is generic, descriptive, the likelihood of confusion it may cause among other similar issues.
The Trademark Manual of…
As discussed in our previous post, for determining the well knownness of a trademark, the claimant of the well knownness is required to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the mark enjoys high reputation among a substantial segment of consumers, with respect to the goods and/or services to which said mark is applied. In order to conceptualize the principle behind the well knownness of a trademark, it is important to understand the legal interpretations of the terms ‘substantial segment of consumers’…
In continuation to our previous post on Well Known marks, in this post we will be discussing the factors that should be taken into consideration while determining the well knownness of a mark.
Section 11(6) and Section 11(7) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 discusses the factors that the Registrar of Trademarks shall take into account while determining the well knownness of a trademark. Section 11(6) provides specific factors for assessing well knownness of a trademark, and Section 11(7) provides specific…