Punchbowl, Inc. v. AJ Press LLC, 2:21-cv-03010-SVW-MAR (C.D.
Cal. Aug. 22, 2024)
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| Punchbowl home page |
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| Punchbowl News home page |
On remand from the 9th Circuit, the court conducts
a multifactor likely confusion analysis and finds that Punchbowl’s digital invitation
services are too distinct for likely confusion with Punchbowl News’s political reporting.
Two points stand out: first, the court considers it significant that mostly
women use Punchbowl and mostly men use Punchbowl News.
Second, there’s a useful discussion of misdirected
communications in light of the unrelatedness of the services. There were about 100, which in the context of thousands of queries a year for each party was not significant. Moreover, misdirected
communications may be probative of the fact that the names are similar, but not
of likely confusion, because relevant confusion has to relate to some kind of
purchase opportunity. Otherwise, trademark would turn into a right in gross:
Ultimately, the dissimilarity and
lack of proximity between the services provided by Plaintiff and Defendant carry
the day. This conclusion is the obvious one. At worst, some consumers might
mistakenly contact one party when they mean to contact the other party. A
misaddressed email, Facebook comment, or X post is a negligible friction that
stems from the fact that both parties have named their services a common word.
No reasonable consumer would purchase a subscription to a party planning software
platform when they intended to subscribe to a news website (or vice versa)
because they thought they came from the same source. No reasonable jury could
find otherwise.
from Blogger http://tushnet.blogspot.com/2024/08/punchbowl-punchback-district-court.html
Rebecca Tushnet 