EU court green lights ‘Miley Cyrus’ trademark
Popstar Miley Cyrus can register her name as an EU trademark after a victory in a long-running dispute at the EU General Court.
The court yesterday, June 16, ruled in favour of the actor and singer’s company Smiley Miley, reversing an earlier decision of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
Cyrus first applied for the trademark in 2014, mostly covering music-related goods and services, as well as products related to video games, TV, and printed materials.
But the EUIPO held that the mark was likely to cause confusion with a 2010 ‘Cyrus’ trademark owned by British Virgin Islands-registered company Cyrus Trademarks, covering audio-visual equipment.
In its 2018 decision, the EUIPO disallowed most elements of the ‘Miley Cyrus’ trademark related to music, allowing it to proceed to registration only for goods including calendars and decorative fridge magnets.
The EUIPO defended this decision before the court, arguing there was no major conceptual difference between the two trademarks.
But according to the court, “the name Miley Cyrus has become the symbol of a concept, due to the celebrity of the person carrying that name”. This was sufficient to distinguish it from the 2010 ‘Cyrus’ trademark in the minds of the average consumer, the court reasoned.
“[The name] Miley Cyrus has a clear and specific semantic content for the relevant public given that it refers to a public figure of international reputation, known by most well-informed, reasonably observant and circumspect person,” the court added, finding that this outweighed the phonetic and visual similarities between the two marks.
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