Punchbowl, punchback: district court finds confusion unlikely between invitation and political news sites

Punchbowl, Inc. v. AJ Press LLC, 2:21-cv-03010-SVW-MAR (C.D. Cal. Aug. 22, 2024)

Punchbowl home page

Punchbowl News home page

On remand from the 9^th Circuit, the court conducts a multifactor likely confusion analysis and finds that Punchbowl’s digital invitation services are too distinct for likely confusion with Punchbowl News’s political reporting. Two points stand out: first, the court considers it significant that mostly women use Punchbowl and mostly men use Punchbowl News.

Second, there’s a useful discussion of misdirected communications in light of the unrelatedness of the services. There were about 100, which in the context of thousands of queries a year for each party was not significant. Moreover, misdirected communications may be probative of the fact that the names are similar, but not of likely confusion, because relevant confusion has to relate to some kind of purchase opportunity. Otherwise, trademark would turn into a right in gross:

Ultimately, the dissimilarity and lack of proximity between the services provided by Plaintiff and Defendant carry the day. This conclusion is the obvious one. At worst, some consumers might mistakenly contact one party when they mean to contact the other party. A misaddressed email, Facebook comment, or X post is a negligible friction that stems from the fact that both parties have named their services a common word. No reasonable consumer would purchase a subscription to a party planning software platform when they intended to subscribe to a news website (or vice versa) because they thought they came from the same source. No reasonable jury could find otherwise.