This episode is about an interesting trademark case Candy Crush, a patent litigation case Marvell, new treatment of black & white trademarks in Europe as well as a useful tool to do a free similarity search on trademarks.

ROLF: Welcome to the very first episode of IP Fridays, the new podcast on intellectual property matters such as trademarks, patents, designs, copyright and any other issues in that field.  Your hosts are Ken Suzan, Hi Ken.  You are on the phone with me?

KEN:   Yes, hello Rolf.

ROLF: Very nice to have you as a co-host. I am Rolf Claessen from Cologne, Germany.  I am partner with patent attorneys Freischem.  We are a medium-sized IP firm mostly handling domestic clients in the field of patent and trademarks. How about you, Ken?

KEN:   I am of counsel here at Barnes & Thornburg in the Minneapolis office.  I practice primarily trademark, copyright and Internet law.  I have been practicing since 1997; first in New York, then Buffalo, and then I joined Barnes & Thornburg in 2012.

ROLF: So what do you think is our goal with this podcast?  What do you want to accomplish with it?

KEN:   I think it is important to help our listeners stay on top of the late-breaking news and information and learn about tools on how they can increase the productivity of their practice, ways to get information on the Internet.  There are so many sources these days for getting information and staying on top of things.  Hopefully, we will be able to guide our listeners in finding the best tools to make sense of all this material, text and information that you can find primarily on the Internet.

ROLF: Right and maybe we can even have some extra tips that our listeners didn’t know about before.  We absolutely hope so.

KEN:   Oh sure, definitely.

ROLF: So why don’t we just jump in and start with some current issues.  I heard about the Candy Crush Saga case.  Did you hear about this?  This was a trademark case in the U.S.  Maybe you are the guy to talk about that?

KEN:   Yes, well that is definitely something that has been hitting the news lately.  We all know about Candy Crush.  That was an interesting case in the sense that the people who were trying to trademark the word “Candy” — they ran into the people who had owned a trademark for a “Candy Swiper” and they ended up abandoning their application for “Candy” and now they obtained rights to a trademark called “Candy Crusher” adding the letters “er” after crush.  So that is one case in which that particular trademark owner King.com is dealing with one entity.

Then they also have at the same time the issue of the word “Saga”.  They were involved with a dispute with The Banner Saga.  There is a company called Stoic and they were able to resolve that matter as well.  So, in essence, you’ve got these situations where games and apps all are out there competing for a limited number of words and names and this is an important case at least to look at and see how these things are being resolved.

ROLF: Right, and my understanding is that Stoic had the earlier trademark and then Candy Crush tried to trademark their name “Candy Crush” and then “Candy Crusher”.  That is correct?

KEN:   Well, in this case there are two different companies.

ROLF: Oh, right.

KEN:   You’ve got the company that owned “Candy Swiper”.  They went out and opposed when the “Candy Crush” people tried to get the word “Candy” and then that ended up with them abandoning their trademark for “Candy” and then moving forward after they acquired rights to “Candy Crusher” which goes back to 2004 according to a use date listed in their trademark application file...