Post by account_disabled on Mar 13, 2024 2:52:04 GMT -6
Products that have different nominative and figurative elements can coexist in the same market without causing confusion among consumers.
It was based on this understanding that judge Marcelo Leonardo Tavares, from the 31st Federal Court of Rio de Janeiro, allowed Cacau Show to explore the Cacau Show LaCreme brand.
The use had been blocked by the B2B Lead National Institute of Intellectual Property (INPI), which rejected the registration because it understood that it conflicted with previous registrations.
According to the decision, however, “the addition of the term Cacau Show, although less prominent in the author's trademark set, still gives it sufficient distance from the impeding mark, promoting a differentiated global impression within the set”.
According to the judge, there is no risk of confusion, which is attested by the fact that the holders of the previous registrations themselves did not present administrative opposition to Cacau Show.
Evocative brand
The judge also considered that the expression “LaCreme” is weak — or evocative —, a classification that is given to products that use common expressions. In these cases, the established jurisprudence is that evocative brands can coexist simultaneously.
“Therefore, there is no need to talk about a conflict, mainly due to the fact that it is a hypothesis that doctrine and jurisprudence call weak brands, which require much less rigid analysis criteria than those considered creative and strong”.
For Fábio Leme , from Daniel Advogados, responsible for defending Cacau Show, “the federal magistrate clearly understood that the brand has sufficient distinctiveness (graphic, visual and phonetic) in relation to the previous brand identified by the INPI, without generating doubts among the consumer public. ”.