Ocado
What do Ocado have to say about the logo? Or is it OK because their markets are different?
www.ocado.com
Sony Ericsson has given up its action against Clearwire for having a swirly green logo, as Clearwire concedes it is unlikely to ever launch a competing range of mobile phones. Sony Ericsson's action was taken in January, when Clearwire was still planning to launch the handsets it announced last year. Since then the operator …
Quite frankly if Sony are trying to say they are confusingly similar then it doesn't say much for their opinion of the 'man on the street'. If you use enough PR-speak then I suppose you could describe them in common terms but good old Occam would say they were different.
At least some of these quibbles in the past had some merit such as the various shades of Apple logo which have been tried but if you choose a random stylised geometric 'thing' as your logo then defending it becomes almost impossible. If you cannot clearly and succinctly describe it such that a high-school art student could fairly accurately reproduce it from the written description then it should require a damned sight more than similarity to be capable of legal action.
Sorry but if I walked into a mobile phone shop and glanced at a handset with that clearwire logo on it then I might well assume it was a Sony Ericsson. And if the handset looked a bit shit then that would reflect badly on SE.
And I really don't understand what you say in your second paragraph. The issue is whether consumers might mistake one for another and that can be based solely on visual similarity. Why should verbal describability have anything to do with it?
It's not like we haven't seen other logos evolve from 2D to 3D (say: Apple), from a stylized outline to a semi-transparent beveled thing with dropshadows and the whole lot.
Vaguely remembering the SE logo (round, poisonous green inside a white flat ball), the Clearwire looks like a freshened-up version --- only with the SE in front of you, you remember that it's a spiral which the CW doesn't have.
This just shows how similar the logos are, from your descriptions even you have managed to muddle them. The SE logo is the 3d design, where the CW is the flat one with the spiral.
I'd agree with Doc Spock that Ocado probably have a bigger case against CW for the similarity, but I don't think CW are heading into the home groceries business any time soon....
can't companies devote their major efforts to producing better products, rather than suing each other before the hat even drops ? Only a lawyer with an eye ever on the chance to drum up a little extremely well-paid but socially entirely destructive work would fail to distinguish between these two logos. Perhaps we should be pleased that Sony has decided to drop its claim, but given the fact that this seems to be due to the realisation that one can't get blood out of a turnip rather than that the claim itself lacks merit, I have to agree with the poet : something is indeed rotten in the state of ....
Henri