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15 May 2019Trademarks

PSG star has bad faith ‘Neymar’ mark invalidated

Brazilian footballer Neymar has convinced the EU General Court that a Portuguese businessman’s bid to register the Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) forward’s name as a trademark was filed in bad faith.

Carlos Moreira filed the mark in 2012 in class 25 for clothing, footwear and headgear. The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) invalidated the mark at Neymar’s request in 2016, a decision which was upheld on appeal the following year.

Yesterday, May 14, the General Court once again dismissed Moreira’s appeal, after finding that the trademark application was made in bad faith.

Moreira had challenged the EUIPO board of appeal’s finding that he “knew that [Neymar] was a rising star in football whose talent was recognised internationally at the relevant date”.

The Portuguese businessman also objected to the EUIPO’s assessment that he “had no motive other than to exploit the intervener’s renown to benefit from it”.

In yesterday’s ruling, however, the General Court ruled that the EUIPO had submitted sufficient evidence to establish that Neymar was an internationally renowned footballer at the time of the trademark application in 2012.

According to the court, Neymar had already garnered “the attention of top-flight clubs in Europe in view of future recruitment several years before his actual transfer to FC Barcelona in 2013”.

Moreira claimed at the hearing that he was aware of Neymar’s existence at the relevant date, but “did not know that he was a rising star in the world of football,” the court said.

Rather, Moreira argued, he “chose the name ‘Neymar’ only and exclusively because of the phonetics of the word and was at no time thinking of the image of the intervener”.

On the same day that the ‘Neymar’ mark was filed, Moreira also filed another trademark application for ‘Iker Casillas’, who was at that time a goalkeeper for Real Madrid and the Spanish national team.

Moreira, however, claimed his choice of the word ‘Neymar’ was “a mere coincidence and does not stem from a conscious desire to use the name of a known footballer”.

The court found that the ‘Iker Casillas’ mark supported the EUIPO’s conclusion that Moreira had knowledge of the world at football at the time of filing the ‘Neymar’ mark.

Neymar is currently the world’s most expensive footballer, after his 2017 transfer to PSG from Barcelona for €222 million (US$248m).

Moreira was ordered to pay costs.

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