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17 December 2015Trademarks

EU court rejects ‘Red riding hood’ trademark opposition

The EU General Court has handed a fairy tale ending to a Spanish resident seeking to trademark the term ‘Red riding hood’ after ruling it was not too similar to the German translation of the phrase.

Yesterday, December 16, the court rejected Germany-based company Rotkäppchen-Mumm Sektkellereien’s opposition to Alberto Ruiz Moncayo’s Community trademark (CTM) application for the phrase covering alcoholic beverages, excluding beer.

Rotkäppchen is the German title for the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale.

Moncayo applied for the CTM at the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM) in 2012. But the German company, citing a trademark it owned covering the German title of the fairy tale, opposed the application shortly afterwards.

OHIM rejected the opposition last year and the decision was upheld earlier this year by the body’s Fourth Board of Appeal.

The court agreed with OHIM that there was a significant conceptual difference between the German terms ‘Rotkäppchen’ and the English translations ‘red’, ‘riding’, and ‘hood’.

“While it is not disputed that the German public has a good knowledge of English in terms of everyday language, it has not been established that the words ‘red’, ‘riding’ and ‘hood’ of the mark applied for are part of basic English v ocabulary.

“It should be noted that such differences between the German and English versions of the title of the fairy tale ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are capable of preventing a consumer with an average level of attention from perceiving immediately that the meaning of the signs at issue is similar,” the court concluded.

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