The Korean Patent Court ruled the applied-for mark, <CLT ENGLISH>(Plaintiff’s mark) is similar to the prior mark <CLTI 학습유형진단> (Patent Court Ruling 2018 huh 7590, January 31, 2019).

Case Overview

(1) Reason of rejection from KIPO (and also reason of maintenance from patent tribunal)

Prominent part of plaintiff’s mark is identical/similar to prior mark

(2) Argument of plaintiff

CLT is well known acronym for “Communicative Language Teaching”

(3) Patent court ruling

CLT cannot be considered as well known acronym for “Communicative Language Teaching”, for it would rather be considered as one of many acronyms for any three words phrase headed by “C”, “L” and “T”

Generally, trademark applications for acronym of commonly used terms in the field is regarded as lacking distinctiveness. For example, there was case of QLED applied for a mark in a display panel or the like as an acronym of Quantum dot Light-Emitting Diodes which was refused due to non-distinctiveness.

In contrast, the Plaintiff’s argument that “CLT” part is the acronym of “Communicative Language Teaching“ which is non-distinctive was deemed to be not persuasive. Since “CLT” is used as acronym for various terms, it is improper to consider “CLT” may be recognized as the acronym only for “Communicative Language Teaching”.

Among the cases handled in our firm, there were cases where the acronym became the issue. At the time, the examiner raised the ground for refusal as non-distinctiveness that "TP" is an acronym of "Transport Protocol" and "LINK" means "unit of communication system". In response, we argued “TP” would not be recognized as the acronym of Transport Protocol since “TP” has been used for many acronyms in various fields, which succeeded in overcoming the refusal.

Accordingly, it is notable that the argument for use in various meanings in a specific acronym can be helpful for achieving distinctiveness of the trademark, when applying for a trademark in Korea.