Hey everyone, this is attorney Brian Russ coming at you with another 60 second Law bite. This one is on Office Action refusals from the US patent trademark office specifically related to 2 (d) refusals. That’s a likelihood of confusion basically means that the trademark office examining attorney looked at your application and determined that the applied for mark so closely resembled an existing mark or an existing application that they barred registration under the trademark act. Generally people refer to the 13 different DuPont factors but basically it always comes down to the same thing which is, you try to trademark a name somebody else already had or maybe you tried to trademark a name you knew somebody else had but you changed one letter. So if you’re trying to trademark the word Smith, but you change the “I” to a “Y”, it’s still basically Smith, the same thing comes out people try to change out just vowels or consonants. Or they “S” at the end and it’s still the same thing, right? The likelihood of confusion is all about what the consumer would believe and consumers are likely to get confused if you try to use the same exact name or only change one letter and still have the same sound meaning site. So these are the most difficult office actions to overcome. If you want to talk to me attorney, give me a call. Let’s talk!