Composite Marks

Abstract

The logical starting point for any discussion of composite marks should be to define what composite marks are. Unfortunately, there is no clear agreement on their meaning in the jurisprudence or scholarship. The archetypical example of a composite mark is sometimes thought to include a word element and a figurative element, and indeed such marks can pose particular problems because, if one element points towards similarity while the other points away from it, it is particularly difficult to analyse how these quite different phenomena will interact. However, the meaning of composite marks seems to be considerably wider than this example, and certainly includes marks which consist of just words. Prominent examples include THOMSON LIFE and BIMBO DOUGHNUTS. These examples include a company name and a subsidiary mark or type of product, but in other cases the elements of the mark are less discrete. For example, the name BARBARA BECKER was treated as a composite mark, and outside the context of confusion, HAVE A BREAK, HAVE A KIT KAT was also labelled as a composite mark.