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11 October 2019TrademarksSaman Javed

UKIPO rules on Amazon Blink trademark opposition

The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has delivered a mixed verdict for Amazon in a trademark dispute over the name of its home security system Blink.

The decision, published Monday, October 7, comes after the owner of online chat website and mobile app Blink Chat opposed Amazon’s application to register both ‘Blink’ and ‘Amazon Blink’ as trademarks.

The owner of the chat service said both applied-for marks would confuse consumers and infringe the name of ‘Blink Chat’, which is registered in classes 9 and 38 for goods and services including messaging software and telecommunication services.

Amazon applied to register its marks in classes 9, 35 and 38 for services including data processing, computer software and retail store services. While the IPO allowed the registration of ‘Amazon Blink’ to go ahead, it denied the registration of ‘Blink’ in classes 9 and 38.

While ‘Blink Chat’ covers “messaging software”, Amazon’s applied-for mark covers “computer software for processing”. The IPO said this “could include messaging software and so must be regarded as identical” to the services covered by ‘Blink’.

Additionally, the IPO said visually and phonetically both ‘Blink Chat’ and ‘Blink’ share the same first word, which it said is clearly the distinctive element of the earlier mark.

But, it found the ‘Amazon Blink’ mark to be similar to ‘Blink Chat’ only to a low degree.

“They clearly share the word ‘Blink’ but it appears in different places within the mark. Each mark has a word which does not appear within the other mark. The dominant and distinctive element of the opponent’s mark is clearly the word Blink, whilst that of the applicant is in both “Amazon” and “Blink” as neither is more distinctive than the other,” the IPO said.

In view of this, the office concluded that there is no likelihood of consumers being directly or indirectly confused into believing ‘Amazon Blink’ and ‘Blink Chat’ are linked.

But, there is a likelihood of consumers believing that there is a link  between ‘Blink’ and ‘Blink Chat’ due to the similarity of the marks and the goods they cover.

For this reason, the IPO said Amazon could not register its ‘Blink’ mark in classes 9 and 38 for goods such as computer software for processing and telecommunication services.

Registration of the mark in class 35 will go ahead as Blink Chat’s mark does not cover retail store services, the IPO said.

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