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18 January 2018Trademarks

EU court upholds rejection of LG’s ‘Dual Edge’ TM

The EU General Court has dismissed an appeal brought by LG Electronics and upheld a finding that the trademark ‘Dual Edge’ has a descriptive character.

The judgment was delivered by the EU General Court’s Seventh Chamber today, January 18.

LG’s appeal centred on the word mark ‘Dual Edge’, which the Korean electronics company applied for with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in August 2015 as EU trademark number 014,463,178. The mark falls under international class 9, relating to smart phones and communications apparatus.

In March 2016 the EUIPO rejected the application because the mark applied for was descriptive. LG filed a notice of appeal in May 2016.

The Second Board of Appeal concurred with the initial rejection and dismissed LG’s appeal in September 2016. It held that the mark was descriptive and that, to members of the relevant public, it would be understood as a descriptive term relating to phones which featured “dual display incorporated along the rims of those devices”.

It added that the mark in question is synonymous with the phrase ‘two edges’, which is vague and unclear and thus does not refer to any characteristic of the products covered by the trademark application.

LG appealed to the General Court and argued that the phrase ‘Dual Edge’ was a newly coined term which therefore made it an invented phrase and not a descriptive term.

The General Court maintained that the combination of two words still had an ascertainable meaning which, when applied to mobile devices, provided a descriptive assessment.

Additionally the court noted that there are products already on the market which feature “expressions similar to the mark applied for” to describe “similar or identical goods”. Examples include devices with dual-edge curved screen display, supplied by various manufacturers.

The court also confirmed that it is not necessary for the mark to be in use in a descriptive manner at the time of applying to register it, but rather that it could be used for such purposes. Therefore the mark “refers directly and specifically to a characteristic of some of the goods covered”, such as the screens of mobile phones.

The appeal was therefore rejected, and LG ordered to pay costs.

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