On April 8, 2010, the Appeals Division of Lithuanian State Patent Bureau has satisfied opposition No. 2474 of the interested person NVG Norddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft mbH regarding the refusal of protection of the national trademark “LIFE IN STYLE” Reg. No. 60239 owned by Ms. Inga Bytautaitė.

The Appeals Division has stated that the main and dominant elements of the comparable marks are words “LIFE” and “STYLE” and they are coincident in both trademarks. Trademarks differ only in the parenthetic elements – symbol “&” in the trademark of interested person and word “in” in the opposed trademark. Therefore visual similarity has been stated. Trademarks also have strong phonetic and semantic similarity. Therefore considering all the stated circumstances, there was remarked that the opposed trademark “LIFE IN STYLE” is confusingly similar to the earlier Community trademark “LIFE & STYLE” as concerns similar goods “printed matter” in class 16 and pursuant to this fact it was stated that there exists a likelihood of confusion on the part of the public.