"Likelihood Of Confusion"Criterion And Its Application

With the deepen reforming of China’s socialist market economy, the social-economic is unprecedented rapid developing. Each company who wants to survive in the fierce market competition must have some specialties. Since its coming out, trademark has always the most simple and effective tools for business to promote their product, especially in the modern society where the economic is developing rapidly and the enterprise are releasing kinds of new goods every day. Therefore, the importance of the protection of trademarks directivity function for producers and consumers is evident. China’s current trademark law and judicial interpretation does not highlight the directional function of trademark protection, nor will cause consumer confusion as deemed trademark infringement prerequisite. It makes counts can only apply "the same or similar of the trademark and goods" as the trademark infringement judgment. Judgment like this is always difficult to protect the legitimate interests of trademark owners and consumers. Sometimes the defendant may suffer the unfair treatment. Based on the trademark legal theory and the "likelihood of confusion" theory, author make a theoretical study and put forward own legislative proposals for trademark confusion and related issues.The first chapter, first to study the concept and function of the trademark infringement, then analyzing what is the right of trademark and the type of trademark infringement.. Subsequently leads to the core proposition of this study. And make a theoretical study and put forward legislative proposals for trademark confusion and related issue, and describing the meaning of "likelihood of confusion" seriously. Finally, author makes a comparison for "the likelihood of confusion" and "the likelihood of dilution", in order to clarity the relationship between the likelihood of confusion and trademark infringement.The second part comprehensive analyzes all decision elements of likelihood of confusion, describes the criteria of likelihood of confusion by analyzing the theory and cases, and introduced the classic cases in United States, The European and china.The third chapter introduced China’s current trademark law and judicial interpretation of the provisions of the "likelihood of confusion", point the inadequacies of current trademark legislation. Finally author put forward a number of proposed changes for China’s trademark legislation, including using the "likelihood of confusion" as an ordinary trademark infringement judgment standard and well-known trademarks should use a trademark anti-dilution protection.