Accents & diacritics
"Café" or "Cafe", "Crème" or "Creme": an accent, an umlaut or a cedilla changes the visual appearance minimally – the sound and meaning, most often, not at all.
Small mark, minimal effect
Diacritics are often skimmed over by the public, or not pronounced at all. Whoever merely adds or omits an accent on a known word mark does not create a sufficient distance.
This is particularly relevant in multilingual Switzerland: the same trademark is written with or without an accent, without anyone perceiving it as different.
Example
This is what such a collision looks like
An accent doesn't make a new trademark
If the difference disappears when read aloud, the protection distance disappears too.
Does free basic protection detect this?
Free basic protection reports the identical spelling. But variants with or without an accent resemble each other only in sound – detecting them reliably is the job of Pro's similarity analysis.
Keep your word mark in view
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This article is for information and does not constitute legal advice.