Apple Tuesday won the right to prevent Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi from registering its `Mi Pad` mobile tablet device as an EU trademark because the name has been deemed too similar to Apple`s iPad (via Reuters).
The General Court, the European Union`s second highest, ruled that registering Mi Pad as a trademark was not in the public interest, as consumers were likely to be confused by the similarity of the signs.
`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. The decision comes three years after Xiaomi filed an application with the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) to register Mi Pad as a trademark, which prompted Apple to lodge a complaint. The EUIPO sided with Apple`s view, based on the grounds that Mi Pad could be misconstrued as a variation of the iPad trademark.
The court agreed with the EUIPO`s decision and said English-speaking consumers were likely to understand the prefix `mi` as meaning `my` and therefore pronounce the `i` of Mi Pad and iPad in the same way.Xiaomi could appeal against the ruling at the EU`s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, but so far no statement on today`s decision has been given by the Chinese mobile maker.
Xiaomi`s expansion into Europe kicked off last month when it began selling its smartphones in Spain. The company has managed to become China`s fourth largest mobile vendor by sales and has launched in dozens of other countries including Indonesia, Vietnam, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Ukraine, as part of a $1 billion overseas expansion drive.
Its devices, ranging from smartphones to tablets, have been publicly criticized in the past for heavily borrowing design elements from Apple`s iPhones and iPads and adopting marketing materials t ...
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