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> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement I can define the di
by TheDong 4y ago
> Can you define that difference? Wingstop and Thighstop for instance are incredibly close and not enough to trigger regulatory enforcement
I can define the difference clearly: "whatever a court decides"
The law is intentionally fuzzy, and in the case of trademark, it's whether the names are "likely to cause consumer confusion", which is an obviously fuzzy thing that cannot be encoded in a computer or with a set of string matching rules. Which is fine, our legal system has humans in it.
If the companies are doing so with the specific intent of causing consumer confusion, then it seems like the court would have a relatively easy time at showing that such an occurrence was likely.
- lovich 4y agoWhat the court decides is different than “similar sounding names”. My point was that similar sounding names are not automatically infringement because they need a court to decide that the similarity doesn’t matter. I explicitly pointed out two similar sounding restaurant names owned by the same entity because either they were assumed to be IP infringement until a court decided they were not, or courts didn’t get involved by default for similar sounding names. The whole point was to make a reductio ab absurdum argument that similarity of names did not matter in terms of IP until courts were involved, so bringing it up as a reason that ghost kitchens couldn’t make similar names a silly argument to make sans lawsuits
- ZiiS 4y agoIn this case a court wouldn't even get involved. One of the brands needs to sue the other one.