Transcription
Kim Kardashian is involved in yet another trademark controversy. I'm gonna talk about that for the next three minutes. I'm Angela Langlotz, trademark and copyright attorney. If you have trademark or copyright law questions, drop them into the comments below; I'll answer them on a future live video.
So I love these celebrity trademark conflicts because they make great case studies. I'm not picking on celebrities; it's just fun to talk about these real-life trademark knots that people get themselves tied into.
So recently, Kim Kardashian was contacted by another skin care brand after she attempted to register the trademark S-K-K-N. I guess that's supposed to be pronounced "skin," uh, for cosmetics—for face creams and stuff like that. That's all in Class 3 for cosmetics. The owner of the trademark, uh, had been using a similar mark, S-K-K-N plus—I guess that's supposed to be pronounced "skin plus"—for cosmetics for a number of years. And so when Kim filed her trademark application, they said, "Whoa, wait a second. We've been using that for a really long time, so you're gonna need to cease and desist because we were there first."
So let's have a look. So here we've got this top one here is what Kim was attempting to register; she applied to register SKKN and also SKKN by Kim. And then this down here is the pre-existing user who had been using the trademark since 2017 or 2018, depending on which version of the story you listen to.
So what's wrong with this? They're different, right? This one on the bottom has a plus, and this one on the top doesn't have a plus. So aren't they different, Angela? Well, no, actually, to the consumer, they're not really different enough to avoid a likelihood of confusion, especially since they're going to be selling the same goods and services. So the issue is that we look at the likelihood of consumer confusion. If it's likely that the consumer is going to be confused when confronted with both marks. Now imagine you're a consumer; you're in the store, and you see on the shelf where all of the skin care products are displayed one mark that says SKKN and another mark that says S-K-K-N plus. As the consumer, I would think, "Oh, SKKN plus is from the same company, but it's like the better version, the plus version," right? That's what I would be thinking. So I think the likelihood of consumer confusion here is very high, and that's why the previous users spoke up and said, "Hey, you know, we were using that mark first."
They made the mistake, of course, the previous user, of not filing a registered trademark—I'm sorry, filing a trademark application so they could get a registered trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Because when the attorney goes in before we file, we always do a search, and if I had been the attorney and I had seen SKKN plus, I would have come back and told my client, "Hey, we need to pick another brand because there's already someone using a very similar mark for skin care products, so we're going to get a trademark refusal."
So I'm Angela Langlotz. I go live here on weekdays to discuss trademark and copyright law. Drop any comments or questions below this video; I answer questions on a future live. You can find me online at trademarkdoctor.net. I'm on YouTube at video.trademarkdoctor.net/youtube. I'm also on Facebook, facebook.com/trademarkdoctor, and now on TikTok; just go search Trademark Doctor.