Peloton Defeats Silly Trademark Suit Over A Plus Sign

Who knew you could make this much fuss over a +" sign? Back in 2021, Peloton was sued by a company called World Champ Tech LLC over the former's Peloton Bike+ name. See, World Champ has a trademark for its biking mobile app called Bike+" and sued claiming that Peloton's product constituted trademark infringement.

World Champ Tech LLC had created an iPhone app, called Bike+" which was designed to " allow users detect, record, store, analyze, and share data from their indoor or outdoor cycling sessions". As part of their their app release, they had also filed a trademark for the name Bike+.

Now, the Peloton Bike+ is a piece of hardware, not an application. That being said, the uses for these products are probably similar enough that purely claiming that these two products were operating in distinct markets alone wouldn't really be enough to avoid a long and lengthy trial.

So let's instead focus on the trademark itself: Bike+". The bulk of the mark is obviously generic. Bike" for either a mobile application for cyclists or a hardware exercise bike is about as unique as a $10 bill. As for the +" symbol, well, that doesn't do much better, even when combined with the first part of the mark. That symbol has been used all over the damned place as a signifier of an uplift or extension of a product or service. Hell, by the time you get done reading this paragraph, you'll already have thought of several products or services that use it in exactly that way.

And it was under that notion that Peloton filed for summary judgement in this case. And, while World Champ Tech similarly filed for summary judgement as well, the court ruled in favor of Peloton. While the ruling points out that there is no actual evidence of customer confusion offered by World Champ Tech, it is also the case that the +" symbol is a widely used one in product lines like this.

The defendant chose to append a +' to Bike' because it is a simple term that consumers understand to signify a product line extension with added features. Numerous leading brands, such as Apple (Apple TV+) and Disney (Disney+), had already adopted +' for their line expansions." Thus, the plus sign can easily be implemented across product lines to indicate a better/best' product array."

So widely used, in fact, that it turns out that World Champ Tech hadn't successfully enforced its trademark in the more directly competing markets of exercise apps.

The defendant submitted evidence of nine other apps in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store using variants of Plus" or +" along with Bike."47 The plaintiff responds that it challenged several of these and the use, if any, stopped,"48 but that does not account for all of them and the fact remains that the [plaintiff's mark] has been repeatedly associated with [similar] products."

And on top of it all, the courts found that the World Champ Tech app has not been well-advertised since 2019, has relatively small usership, and that that usership is currently in decline. Add onto all of that the court rightly pointing out that the mark is entirely, or nearly entirely descriptive, and the court ruled for Peloton.

And crucially, the Bike+ mark is descriptive and is joined in the marketplace by equivalent app names and variants on that composite mark. Not surprisingly, despite several years of coexistence, no evidence of actual confusion was submitted.

And that should hopefully be the end of that. The only remaining question is why in the world the USPTO granted this trademark to begin with.