상표 ‘REVANESSE’와 ‘Reviness 리바이네스’는 유사하지 않다

A Case Study Regarding Patent Court Case No. 2019HUR5096 for Invalidation of ‘Reviness 리바이네스’ over ‘REVANESSE’

The petitioner, a Canadian company, Prollenium, is the owner of a Korean trademark registration for ‘REVANESSE’ in class 03 (cosmetic gel in prefilled syringes for use in cosmetic treatment procedures) . Later, a Korean company, BR Pharm, filed a trademark application for ‘Reviness 리바이네스’ (‘리바이네스’ is a Korean transliteration of ‘Reviness’) and obtained a registration for class 10 for medical fillers, etc. Prollenium filed an invalidation action against the BR Pharm’s registration. The Trademark Office decided that the marks are similar each other phonetically and the goods are the same, and invalidated the BR Pharm’s registration. BR Pharm filed an appeal with the Korean patent court. The court reversed the PTO decision, reasoning that the marks are not similar in that ‘REVANESSE’ has four syllables while ‘Reviness 리바이네스’ has five syllables in Korean pronunciation, and that ‘REVANESSE’ has a first syllable of ‘RE’ while ‘Reviness 리바이네스’ has a first syllable of ‘Ri’. A foreign lawyer said “why do I file trademarks in Korea?”.