The Court of Appeal dismissed the application for infringement of the trademark O-SMOKE, which was used in the domain names “o-smoke.eu” and “o-smoke.fr”.
In fact, it found that the defendant justified, prior to the filing of the opposing trademark, the use of the O SMOKE logo, and that it already owned the disputed domain names: “the registration of these domain names, which consolidate rights over the trade name, subsequently used to make the company’s products accessible throughout the country, may validly be opposed to the infringement action, which was rightly rejected by the court.”
