EU General Court upholds EUIPO ruling over furniture TM
A German building management company has lost an appeal at the EU General Court after its trademark application was rejected by the EU Intellectual Property Office ( EUIPO).
The decision, published earlier today, September 9, upheld a ruling by the EUIPO’s Second Board of Appeal, finding that SLL Service cannot register the figurative mark ‘Lumin8’ in classes 6,19, and 20 for goods such as furniture, and building and construction materials.
SLL Service’s trademark application was originally opposed by Elfa International, a Sweden-based storage solution company. Elfa said the applied-for mark would infringe on two of its earlier trademarks, ‘Lumi’ and ‘Lumi Endless’, registered in classes 6, 19 and 20.
In November 2017, the EUIPO rejected SLL Service’s application, a decision which was later upheld by the board of appeal in August 2018.
In its ruling today, the General Court agreed with the board that while the applied-for mark and earlier trademarks differ in some elements, like the additional letter ‘n’ and number ‘8’ in the applied-for mark, the first four letters of the marks are identical.
Aside from the letters being identical, it said the applied-for mark has a number of letters in the same position as they are in the earlier trademarks.
“Consequently, the overall impression created by the signs at issue is dominated, in each of those signs, by the fact that they have the same sequence of letters, ‘l’ ‘u’ ‘m’ ‘i’,” the court said.
“Those similarities will be noticed immediately and easily be remembered by the relevant public,” it added.
The court also referred to settled case-law, which determined that “where a figurative mark containing word elements is compared visually to a word mark, the marks are held to be visually similar if they have a significant number of letters in the same position in common and if the word element of the figurative sign is not highly stylised”.
The court found the stylisation of SLL Service’s mark to be “minimalistic” and “not particularly eye-catching”.
As a result, the court said the similarities between the applied-for and earlier trademarks outweigh and cannot be counteracted by their differences, and that a likelihood of confusion between the marks exists.
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