The U.S. Patent and Trademark Workplace (USTPO) final week sustained two oppositions filed by Spotify AB in opposition to two trademark purposes by U.S. Software program Inc. for its hashish software program POTIFY, IP Watchdog studies. The USTPO discovered POTIFY’s logos would have diluted and blurred logos held by the favored music streaming service.
U.S. Software program had filed the trademark purposes in 2017 and 2018 which sought to register POTIFY for: “downloadable software program to be used in looking out, creating and making compilations, rankings, scores, opinions, referrals and suggestions regarding medical marijuana dispensaries and physician’s workplaces and displaying and sharing a consumer’s location and discovering, finding, and interacting with different customers and place, in Worldwide Class 9,” in line with the January 10 decision. The corporate had additionally sought the trademark for clothes, medical hashish info, creating a web based group for medical hashish sufferers and schedule healthcare providers.
Spotify opposed the mark, claiming widespread legislation rights to the SPOTIFY registration for his or her music and leisure software program and promoting and that the POTIFY mark would doubtless trigger shopper confusion and dilution. The corporate additionally claimed that as a result of “pot” is a colloquial time period for hashish, “shoppers will affiliate the POTIFY mark with the promotion of marijuana use” and any “affiliation of marijuana-related items and providers with the SPOTIFY mark is prone to tarnish the SPOTIFY mark.” The Trademark and Trial Enchantment Board famous that Spotify already hosts content material, akin to music and podcasts, associated to hashish.
U.S. Software program argued that its product just isn’t for particular person shoppers, fairly “gross sales methods, telemedicine methods, and enterprise useful resource planning methods,” and “is a back-end software program platform designed for authorized marijuana dispensaries to market and promote their merchandise.” The corporate additionally argued that POTIFY existed in 2014 earlier than Spotify turned well-known and was derived from the Shopify moniker, not the streaming platform.
Finally, the board discovered that “as a result of the marks SPOTIFY and POTIFY are used for software program merchandise that carry out analogous features, and are so comparable in look and sound, their industrial impressions are comparable even when shoppers take completely different meanings from SPOT and POT,” and it’s “inevitable POTIFY will diminish SPOTIFY’s distinctiveness.”
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