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Articoli Correlati: trademarks

On 8 February 2019, the General Court of the European Union, in the case T-647/17 annulled EUIPO’s decision refusing registration of the figurative mark ‘Chiara Ferragni’ as an E.U. trade mark. The Court noted, first of all, that the average consumer perceives a mark as a whole and the mark interested is a composite mark formed of both word and figurative elements, in particular of the two word elements, ‘chiarà and ‘ferragni’, in black capital letters, with the letters ‘i’ in bold, and a figurative element, positioned above the word elements, consisting of a drawing representing a sky blue eye with long black lashes. For the Court the two signs at issue are conceptually different, since the contested mark applied for identifies a specific person, while the earlier word mark merely refers to a first name, without identifying a specific person. About the likelihood of confusion, despite the fact that the goods in question are identical or similar, the differences between the signs, particularly the visual differences, provide sufficient grounds to rule out any likelihood of confusion on the part of the public. As the goods in question are generally sold in self-service stores where decisions to purchase are mainly based on visual criteria, the differences between the two marks mean that consumers will not think that the goods come from the same undertaking or from economically-linked undertakings when they bear the marks at issue.