In Judgment T-144/10, the Court rejected the opposition brought by Space Beach Club against figurative CTM application ‘Space of Sound’ registered for goods and services in Classes 9, 31 and 45 on the basis of the earlier Spanish and Community trademarks, such as the following:

The Court censored the Board for taking into consideration a more specialized public in general for Class 41 which only concerns ‘production and editing of television programmes’ services, for the rest of the goods and services, the degree of attention is the one of the average consumer.

As regards the comparison of the signs, substantial differences exist: visually, the contested CTM consists of a rising sun, with the dominant element being SPS, whereas the earlier trademarks are principally determined by the word element SPACE, have an additional element in each sign(Ibiza, Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Mallorca, Eivissa, etc) and have other figurative elements (such as palm trees, plane, etc in color). The presence of the common ‘sunset or sunrise’ is represented differently (in black and white with undulating rays, or in color, without rays and together with the moon for the earlier signs) and minimizes the overall similarity.

Phonetically, even if the signs coincide in the element ‘space’, the absence of other relevant similarities counterbalance this common element. Conceptually, the comparison is less relevant for the non English-speaker consumer and given their overall differences, there can be no likelihood of confusion.