Why Are These Identical Logos Allowed To Co-Exist As Trademarks?

Local or nearly identical logos? Not an infringement! Stick around and you'll find out why. I'm Angela Langlotz, trademark and copyright attorney and I go live here on weekdays to talk about trademark and copyright law. Today, we're going to look at a case study between HubSpot and Orange Theory. I'm going to talk about why these two logos, even though they look like they're nearly identical, aren't actually a trademark infringement. Now, you have trademark infringement when you have consumer confusion or the likelihood of consumer confusion between one party's goods and another party's goods.

But sometimes we can have marks that are exactly the same, that aren't actually an infringement. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. It depends on what the goods and services are. If consumers in the marketplace are used to seeing the same two types of goods come from the same company, the same source, then we say that those two things are and are "confusingly similar" and that there is an infringement -- that the junior user, the second user -- is infringing the senior user's, the first user's trademark.

Let's take a look, though, today at a case study. I'm going to shrink myself into the corner here and we're going to have a look. So this is my friend Tim Lyons. I'm going to tag him on this. So he sees that the content that he's putting out is useful. He was wondering why these two seemingly conflicting marks can exist. Well, it's because the goods are really different. Now, this one on the left belongs to Orange Theory.

Orange Theory is a chain of gyms, and they offer these high intensity interval workouts. So it's a gym chain. Their services would be like, you know, gym services or athletic club services. Right. The one on the right is HubSpot. They create marketing software for salespeople. Right. So their goods and services are completely different than that of Orange Theory, even though these two marks look very much the same. Now, the goods are so different that a consumer isn't going to say, hmm, I wonder if the same people who are running my gym are also creating marketing software for inbound sales.

Probably not. Right. You don't tend to see that same service or goods from the same company. So we wouldn't be confused when in the marketplace we're confronted with these two marks because the goods are very dissimilar, even though the marks are the same. Now, if these two people, if these two companies were to be making goods that were related, like, say, one made sunglasses and one made cosmetics, now we're used to seeing goods like that come from the same source.

For example, Tom Ford makes sunglasses and cosmetics, Chanel makes sunglasses and cosmetics. Marc Jacobs, I think, makes...Maybe not Marc Jacobs. Anyway, it's very common, especially in the luxury goods sector, to see sunglasses and cosmetics made by the same company. But here we don't have outbound or inbound sales softwares and gyms coming from the same company, that just doesn't happen, so we wouldn't be confused here, so that is why we can have exactly or almost exactly the same logo for different goods.

and they're not an infringement. I'm Angela Langlotz and I go live here on weekdays to talk about trademarks and copyrights. You can find me online at TrademarkDoctor.net. And if you'd like to be notified every time I go live here on Facebook, please like my Facebook page at Facebook, dot com forward, slash TrademarkDoctor.net and you'll be notified each and every time I go live.