Apple won another infringement proceedings. This time, the dispute involved Chinese company Xiaomi, which tried to register Mi Pad as an EU trademark. Apparently, Apple experts were one step ahead of the Chinese company and filed a lawsuit to prohibit the registration of a similar name of a tablet, which also looks similar to the iPad.
According to representatives of the US corporation, such a "disguise" can confuse potential buyers. The European Union’s second-highest court, the General Court, carefully studied the case and sided with Apple. “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. The history of Mi Pad and iPad began in 2014, when Apple lodged a complaint to the European Union's Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). The EUIPO also agreed that consumers could think Mi Pad was a variation on Apple’s iPad trademark. However, this did not stop Xiaomi from pushing its products to the EU market, which resulted in a lawsuit.
Now the Chinese smartphones manufacturer can try to address this issue at the EU’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union. This will be the final decision that cannot be appealed.
