This type of quick post might become a semi-regular feature, but, for now, consider it a one-off. Looking at a few recent Office Actions today, one caught my eye – a Madrid-based application into the US for the mark MOFFAT, for a variety of cooking equipment.

The Office raised a couple of issues in the Office Action of March 13, 2024 – weirdly, listing some but not all of them in the “Summary of Issues” section. The two of interest were a 2(e)(4) refusal (primarily merely a surname) and a 2(d) refusal (likelihood of confusion with a prior registration for MUAFOT for similar goods).

These two refusals seemed inconsistent to me. If MOFFAT is primarily merely a surname (and “Moffat” is certainly, at the least, often a surname), then it will be viewed as a unit as that name. MUAFOT differs only by some vowels and a repeated consonant, so it’s going to hit on phonetic searching algorithms, but I think an actual human viewer parses these quite differently — the pair “UA” isn’t even really a diphthong in English, so a viewer would likely pronounce each vowel separately. However it’s parsed, I think, it’s not likely to be understood as “a variant of MUAFOT.”

Are other applicants making similar arguments? Yes! Applicants have made comparable arguments to distinguish marks like, say, EMME and EMMA, FOLI and FOLEY’S, WOLFF vs WOLF, KROM vs CHROME, CIVELLO vs CHEVILLOT, and etc., and some poking around in TM TKO can find similar examples of those two issues paired in refusals where the applications subsequently made it through to registration.