While the rest of Europe is discussing the impact of the Intel ruling of the European Court of Justice, the multi-membered first instance court of Thiva (or Thebes for the friends of ancient greek literature) decided to disregard the fundamental rules in judging confusing similarity (decision no. 10/2008, unfortunately unavailable electronically). The complainant, owner of the trade marks “POSEIDON” and “??S???O?” (POSEIDON, in greek characters) sued the defendant for trade mark and unfair competition (passing off) infringement over the use of the mark “??S???O?” (notice the latin S in the middle?). All marks were used for the trade of sea boats. Following its scrutiny (?) of the case, the court held that the latin S in the defendant’s mark suffices to rule out risk of confusion between the conficting marks. For those worried, please note that this is indeed a peculiar judgment and that under decision 335/1994 of the Supreme Court of Greece (Areios Pagos) the transliteration of a registered or unregistered word mark from latin characters to greek would amount to trade mark /unfair competition infringement.

For information on the mighty - unaware of all this - Poseidon click here.