“Apple Inc succeeded on Tuesday in preventing Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Inc from registering its ‘Mi Pad’ tablet computer as an EU trademark because the name was too similar to Apple’s ‘iPad,'” Reuters reports.
“The European Union’s second-highest court, the General Court, ruled that Mi Pad should not be registered as a trademark because consumers were likely to be confused by the similarity of the signs,” Reuters reports. “‘The dissimilarity between the signs at issue, resulting from the presence of the additional letter ‘m’ at the beginning of ‘Mi Pad,’ is not sufficient to offset the high degree of visual and phonetic similarity between the two signs,’ the Court said in a statement.”
“Xiaomi filed an application in 2014 with the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to register Mi Pad as an EU trademark,” Reuters reports. “Apple subsequently lodged a complaint that the EUIPO upheld in 2016 on the grounds that consumers would think Mi Pad was a variation on Apple’s iPad trademark.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Duh.
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Xiaomi meant to call it the “Me 2 Pad.” Resemblance merely coincidence.
I think it’s quite natural. xiaomi is chinese products, certainly not all users in europe want to accept products from china.