Specialty Brands, Inc. v. Coffee Bean Distributors, Inc.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that purchasers of relatively inexpensive products should be held to a lesser standard of purchasing care
• holding that “[w]hen an opposer’s trademark is a strong, famous mark, it can never be of little consequence” in a likelihood-of-con- fusion analysis (internal quotation marks omitted)
• discounting third-party marks alleged to show weakness of the cited mark because the third-party marks were more dissimilar from the marks at issue than the marks at issue were from each other
• fame important to likelihood of confusion inquiry because public may exercise less care in purchasing product under a famous name
• “Although applicant disclaimed the word ‘spice’ apart from SPICE VALLEY as a whole, the marks are viewed in their en-tireties.”
• “It is the similarity of commercial impression between SPICE VALLEY and SPICE ISLANDS that weighs heavily against the applicant”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).