[Case Summary]

On November 24, 2017, Quanfang accepted the commission of Hangzhou YC Agricultural Development Co., Ltd. to apply for the "Cloud" trademark with the Trademark Office. After review, the Trademark Office found that it was similar to trademarks such as "Cloud", "Caiyun", and "Yuncai YC", and rejected the registration application of the trademark on five goods including "Egg".

After analysis, the reason for rejection of the customer's key product project "Egg" is the existence of a similar trademark "Yuncai YC". In this regard, we believe that on the one hand, there are differences in the concept, textual composition, overall structure, and visual appearance between the applied trademark and the cited trademark, and the applied trademark has strong distinctiveness, certain influence, and high popularity after long-term and continuous use; On the other hand, the cited trademark "Yuncai YC" is about to be registered for three years. Through online and other media investigations, no information was found that the trademark registrant has been continuously promoting the "Yuncai YC" trademark on "egg" products in China, nor has any actual sales or physical stores of goods been found. Therefore, we consider the possibility that it has not actually used the "Yuncai YC" trademark.

Therefore, we suggest: firstly, filing a review application only for the "egg" goods designated for use in the trademark application, and abandoning the review application for other goods; Secondly, if the cited trademark is not used for three consecutive years, the application for revocation of the registered trademark shall be filed.

After efforts, this case was finally successful, and the ruling result is as follows: the re examination was successful, and the application for trademark registration on the re examined goods was preliminarily approved.

 [Case Analysis]

1、 When the application for a trademark is rejected by citing multiple prior trademarks, it may be considered to conduct a re examination only for the core commodity project, and then analyze the reasons for rejection for the core commodity project;

2、 If the cited trademark has been registered for three years or is about to be registered for three years, it can be preliminarily judged through online and market research whether it is being used. For cited trademarks with a low possibility of use, it may be considered to file a registration trademark cancellation application for three consecutive years without use. If the other party cannot provide valid evidence of use, the other party's trademark will be cancelled, and our prior obstacles will be eliminated;

3、 When handling this case, attempts were made to negotiate coexistence, but the other party refused the coexistence request. In practical applications, the coexistence agreement is relatively low in recognition due to various factors such as national conditions and cognition. Therefore, the legal act of withdrawing the application is actually a last resort.