Catalan public broadcaster wins TM victory over EUIPO
The Catalan public broadcaster has won a victory at the EU General Court, which yesterday, February 6, overturned a decision of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) in a trademark opposition.
Public broadcaster Televisió de Catalunya had applied to block Paris resident Stéphane Dalmat from registering ‘LaTV3D’ as a trademark.
According to LaTV3D’s social media platforms, the Paris-based broadcaster is a video-on-demand service offering programming in 3D.
The Catalan broadcaster said the ‘LaTV3D’ mark was confusingly similar to the name of its ‘TV3’ station, which is also a registered trademark.
Both the ‘LaTV3D’ filing and the ‘TV3’ mark are in classes 38 and 41, covering telecommunications and other related services.
The EUIPO sided with Dalmat, ruling that there was little similarity between the two marks and that the ‘TV3’ mark was not distinctive.
Corporació Catalana de Mitjans Audiovisuals (CCMA), which operates Televisió de Catalunya and is owned by the regional Catalan government, appealed against the EUIPO’s decision to the General Court.
In yesterday’s ruling, the court ruled that the EUIPO had underestimated the similarity between the marks.
As part of its reasoning, the court said it could not be ruled out that ‘LaTV3D’ might be interpreted as a play on words for the Catalan station TV3 offering three-dimensional broadcasts.
The court also said that the EUIPO had ascribed too much weight to the ‘La’ element of the mark, which it said did not sufficiently distinguish it from ‘TV3’.
The EUIPO had “wrongly underestimated the visual and phonetic similarity of the signs and it wrongly denied the existence of a conceptual similarity between them,” the court concluded.
The court annulled the EUIPO’s decision “insofar as it ruled out the existence of a likelihood of confusion” between the marks.
The ‘LaTV3D’ may be registered for translation and interpretation services in Class 41, as the Catalan broadcaster’s mark does not cover this area.
Each party was ordered to bear its own costs.
Did you enjoy reading this story? Sign up to our free daily newsletters and get stories like this sent straight to your inbox.
Today's top stories:
AT&T beats Cheetah patent claim with the ‘grandparent’ principle
USITC investigates Google speakers after Sonos complaint
US govt considering Nokia/Ericsson takeover to counter China’s 5G lead
