BBC News reports that software giant Microsoft has just lost a legal battle in Europe over its SKYPE™ trademark. The General Court of the European Union held this week that Microsoft’s SKYPE mark is confusingly similar to UK-based broadcaster Sky plc’s SKY® mark, upholding a refusal to register the SKYPE mark by the EU’s Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market. According to the court, “the figurative element [of the SKYPE mark] conveys no concept, except perhaps that of a cloud,” which “would further increase the likelihood of the element ‘Sky’ being recognised within the word element ‘Skype,’ for clouds are to be found ‘in the sky’ and thus may readily be associated with the word ‘sky.’” The court’s judgment follows an earlier, high-profile dispute between the two companies—Microsoft’s SKYDRIVE cloud storage service was changed to ONEDRIVE in 2014 following a British court’s ruling that the SKYDRIVE mark was confusingly similar to Sky’s SKY mark for similar services. Read the full article here. Reposted from BBC News.

By Skype (http://www.skype.com/) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.