Pretoria - There can be no confusion between the online businesses Yuppiechef and Yuppie Gadgets, the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) has ruled.
A fierce battle between the two companies over the Yuppie name in the online shopping domain has ended in a victory for Yuppy Gadgets.
Yuppiechef earlier took Yuppie Gadgets to the Western Cape High Court, claiming that the latter infringed on the Yuppiechef trade mark as shoppers could confuse the two businesses.
The high court concluded there was no copyright infringement, but Yuppiechef turned to the SCA, which confirmed that shoppers would not confuse the two.
Judge MJD Wallis, in a judgment concurred to by four other judges, said the word “Yuppie” entered the lexicon of the English language in the early 1990s.
It was an acronym derived from “young, urban or upwardly mobile professional person”. Some people falling within this description regarded it as a badge of pride to be described as a yuppie, he said.
“On the other hand, the word chef has a far longer pedigree in English as a description of a professional cook. When combined into Yuppiechef, the resulting word conveys an impression of young people living an affluent lifestyle with a serious interest in the culinary,” the judge said.
Yuppiechef is an online retailer of kitchen and household goods. The business of Yuppie Gadgets, on the other hand, can be described as novelty items such as a vase in the shape of a whale and a self stirring cup.
Yuppie Gadgets said it changed its name to this, as it had more “pizzazz”.
It said its business did not overlap with that of Yuppiechef and that the latter could not monopolise the name “Yuppie”.
One of Yuppiechef’s biggest complaints was that when the word “Yuppie” was typed into a search engine, a menu appears showing both Yuppiechef and Yuppie Gadgets.
This, it argued, would divert customers from its site to look at what Yuppie Gadgets had to offer out of curiosity.
Yuppie Gadgets said it did not use this name in relation to its goods, but only to conduct its business as an online retailer of goods.
The judge said the obvious point of similarity between the two marks was in the use of the word Yuppie. “While Yuppie is common to both, chef and gadgets are incapable of being confused, either when seen or spoken. The one consists of a singe syllable, the other of two,” the judge said.
Yuppiechef was, among others, aggrieved as an online shopper who bought a lot of gadgets from Yuppie Gadgets and wanted to buy an additional ice cream doorstop, by mistake contacted Yuppiechef to make the purchase.
It was argued that this proved the confusion between the two businesses.
But the judge said this was simply an error and not confusion. He said he took a look at both websites and the similarity escaped him.
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