Starbucks Corp. defeated a Belgian coffee lover at a European Union court in a long-winded fight to quash her EU-wide rights to a trademark emblazoned with the words “Coffee Rocks.” The label was far too similar to ones already registered by the Seattle-based coffee giant, the EU General Court ruled Tuesday in Luxembourg. The Belgian woman’s streak of luck finally ran out after she initially won the EU rights in 2013 and clung on to them despite Starbucks’s opposition. The EU court chided the bloc’s IP office in Alicante, Spain, for rejecting Starbucks’s initial appeals and failing to see that people could get confused by how similar both marks were. While Starbucks doesn’t use the words Coffee Rocks on its trademarks, the overall appearance of the contested image and its similarity with the Starbucks logos was too striking for the court to let this one go. Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/starbucks-coffee-is-the-only-one-that-rocks-eu-court-says
