A recent judgment in a trade mark opposition in Seychelles is
worth a look, not only because it involves a major international
brand, but because IP judgments are quite rare in certain African
countries.
The opposition
The facts were that a Seychelles company called Intelvision
Limited applied to register the trade mark Intelvision (a stylised
version of the word together with an antenna logo) for services in
class 38. The application attracted an opposition from the US
company Intel Corporation. The opposition was based on a number of
grounds. The grounds are quite difficult to follow from a reading
of the judgment because issues of confusingly similarity have
seemingly been conflated with issues of distinctivess and
deceptivess, but essentially the argument was that the application
would result in:
