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.”
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.
Xiaomi’s Mi Pad and Apple’s iPad are both tablet computers.
“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.
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