The Cognizance And Remedies Of Trademark Reverse Confusion Infringement

The case of "Fei Cheng Wu Rao" triggered extensive discussions from all walks of life. One of the biggest controversies is the analysis of trademark reverse confusion. Reverse confusion originated in the United States cases, which refers to a trademark infringement, in which the confusion of the direction is different from the traditional forward confusion. Mistakes occurred in the source of goods made by prior trademark holder or user. At first reverse confusion did not included in the legal protection, along with the increasing of such cases, discussions were from all walks of life about whether or not reverse confusion led to damage and the necessity of regulation of there. More and more courts thought that regulations should be carried out on the reverse confusion. American courts brought new rules to regulate trademark reverse confusion infringement, which are based on the differences between the forward and reverse confusion.At present there are many cases involving reverse confusion in China, all in accordance with the regulations of forward confusion in our country’s trademark law. Because of the differences between the two kinds of confusion, it is not suitable to apply those rules to the infringement and relief measures of reverse confusion. It will lead to the situation- "obvious distinctions of the sentences of the same kind of cases ". This makes impossible to realize the targets of trademark law-protect the trademark owners, consumers, maintenance of market order.In order to solve the problem, this paper tries to analyze the cases involving reverse confusion in China to find the problems that exist in the reverse confusion in our country, the current academic circles in our country on the aforementioned issues and the cases about reverse confusion in America to sort out the definition of reverse confusion, necessity to regulation and disputes. Though all these analysis, this paper makes clear the necessity to regulating reverse confusion in China and gives analysis and suggestion from two aspects.A: the identification of trademark reverse confusion infringement. At present, the main viewpoint of China’s scholars about this problem is identifying it on the basis of likelihood of confusion which is the same with the sentence of America’s cases. But there are a lot of differences about factors to identify the likelihood of confusion. This paper analyzes the controversies and the factors which is different in function when identifying the likelihood of confusion in the forward confusion.B: The remedies of trademark reverse confusion. The viewpoints of this part in domestic judgment papers are very different. There are many suggestions for reverse confusion remedies, but very few analysis of the proposals. Different court cases in the United States have different judgments of the problem. This paper analyzes and discusses the cognition to the problem.Through the above analysis, the paper tries to make a suggestion about the cognizance and remedies of trademark reverse confusion infringement based on the rules and situation in our country.