Now in its twelfth year, Class 46 is dedicated to European trade mark law and practice. This weblog is written by a team of enthusiasts who want to spread the word and share their thoughts with others.
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Switzerland: the meaning of GAP
The clothing retailer Gap Inc, San Francisco, sought to register the word mark GAP for (essentially) toys in Switzerland. The Swiss IPO refused - noting that Gap is also a city in the southern part of France, and therefore a geographic indication. Since the goods to be sold under the mark GAP were not necessarily manufactured in France, the use of GAP was misleading (that's the weird Swiss way of dealing with geographic indications - marks containing a geographic indication are considered misleading if the goods are not from the indicated region, not descriptive).
Gap Inc. appealed to the Federal Administrative Court. The court basically had to decide whether GAP stood, in the eyes of the average consumer, for
(image from the official site of the municipality of Gap, France) or
It came to the - I believe sensible - conclusion that a majority of Swiss consumers would understand GAP either as the English word for "opening" (which is not descriptive for the claimed goods) or associate it with the clothing brand GAP, which was known in Switzerland. While Gap was not a tiny town and a tourist destination, it was concluded that only a small part of the relevant public would actually know that a city named Gap existed. There was also no need to keep the sign GAP freely available for producers of the claimed goods located in Gap, since GAP had already been registered as a Community trade mark for the relevant goods, hence precluding unauthorized use.
German summary of the decision of 15 February 2010 here (with link to full text).
Posted by: Mark Schweizer @ 10.49Tags: Switzerland, absolute grounds of refusal, geographic indication,
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