Reliable legal assistance of KWKR: positive consideration of the opposition to the Polish Patent Office

At the end of last year, we received very good news from the Polish Patent Office. The case concerned the opposition we filed with the Office on behalf of our client against the use of a very similar trademark by a competitor.

If the opponent’s mark had been registered, there would have been a risk of misleading the public and of association with our client’s earlier marks, as well as a risk of damaging the reputation of the client’s marks and unfair advantage to the applicant from the use of the mark applied for. The risk was all the more important as both parties specialize in the education sector and their services are closely related to foreign language teaching.

The Office decided that our opposition was well-founded in its entirety and at the same time awarded us legal costs. The competitiveness of the companies involved in the case and the arguments we raised demonstrating the similarity of the disputed marks had a significant impact on the Office’s final decision. In the Office’s opinion, the compared trademarks were almost identical phonetically and in terms of meaning – the difference consisted only in one additional letter in the name.

Since in our case there is a significant similarity of both the services and the compared marks, in the Office’s opinion there is a high likelihood of confusion among the public, which justifies the acceptance of our opposition in its entirety. Thus, the other party will not be able to use its sign in the trade and its trademark will not be registered by the Office.

More and more companies decide to register their trademark, which often brings about confusion with an earlier trademark of a competitor, therefore it is worth keeping an eye on and monitoring trademark registration applications filed with the Patent Office. Thus, if a competitor files a trademark similar to ours, we can react quickly and file an opposition to registration. Thanks to that, the receivers will not be confronted with two, competing for signs.

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