Trade marks mentioning a fanciful year. Year of establishment. Luxury leather goods such as handbags. Trade marks allegedly deceiving the public as to the year of establishment of their proprietor. Conclusie AG: No ground for invalidity.
Case C‑412/24 Fauré Le Page v Goyard
Preliminary questions:
(1) Must Article 3(1)(g) of Directive [2008/95] be interpreted as meaning that a reference to a fanciful [year] in a trade mark conveying false information on the age, reliability and know-how of the manufacturer of the goods and, consequently, on one of the intangible characteristics of those goods is sufficient to establish the existence of actual deceit or a sufficiently serious risk that the consumer will be deceived?
(2) If the answer to the first question is in the negative, must that article be interpreted as meaning[:]
(a) that a trade mark may be regarded as deceptive where there is a likelihood that consumers of the goods and services designated by the trade mark will believe that the proprietor of that trade mark has been producing those goods for centuries, thereby conferring on them a prestigious image, whereas that is not the case?
(b) that, in order to establish the existence of actual deceit or a sufficiently serious risk that the consumer will be deceived, on which a finding that a trade mark is deceptive depends, the trade mark must constitute a sufficiently specific designation of potential characteristics of the goods and services for which it is registered, so that the targeted consumer is led to believe that the goods and services possess certain characteristics which they do not in fact possess?
The present request for a preliminary ruling concerns the interpretation of Article 3(1)(g) of Directive 2008/95/EC to approximate the laws of the Member States relating to trade marks. (2) That provision requires Member States to refuse the registration of, or declare invalid, trade marks that are of ‘such a nature as to deceive the public, for instance, as to the nature, quality or geographical origin of the goods or service’.
That request was introduced in the context of a dispute between three French companies that manufacture and sell handbags and other leather goods – Fauré Le Page Maroquinier SAS and Fauré Le Page Paris SAS (together, ‘Fauré Le Page’), on the one hand, and Goyard ST-Honoré SAS (‘Goyard’), on the other hand – regarding the validity of two national semi-figurative trade marks, held by Fauré Le Page Paris which include the year ‘1717’.
According to Goyard, the contested trade marks are liable to deceive the public, within the meaning of Article 3(1)(g) of Directive 2008/95, and should, thus, be declared invalid in application of that provision. In that regard, it argues that the inclusion of the year ‘1717’ in those trade marks conveys the impression that their proprietor was established in 1717 and, consequently, that the goods covered by the marks are produced according to the know-how of a centuries-old company and possess a particular level of quality. In reality, however, this is not the case, as Fauré Le Page Paris and Fauré Le Page Maroquinier were only created in 2009 and 2011, respectively.
Only one judgment has, to my knowledge, thus far been issued by the Court on the interpretation of a previous version of that provision. (IPPT20060330) The present case provides the Court with the opportunity to further clarify the conditions of its application.
Conclusion AG:
Article 3(1)(g) [Trademark Directive] must be interpreted as meaning that the inclusion, in a trade mark, of a year which may be understood by the public as indicating the year of establishment of the trade mark’s proprietor, when that is not the case, cannot, in itself, lead to the invalidity of that mark. For a trade mark to be declared invalid under that provision, it must be of such a nature as to deceive the public as to a characteristic of the goods or services that it covers and must constitute a sufficiently specific designation of that characteristic. Moreover, any circumstance – such as the actual year of establishment of the trade mark’s current proprietor –external to the mark itself or the list of goods and services covered by it, as presented at the time of the application for registration, should not be taken into account in the assessment under Article 3(1)(g) of that directive.
ECLI:EU:C:2025:930 and case C-412/24
