May 2019. It’s been a rough month for EasyGroup, the holding company for the ‘easy’ family of trademarks. In a bid to claim exclusive rights to the generic word ‘easy’, EasyJet’s parent company recently opened fire against four other trademarks featuring the word ‘easy’. And failed in each case.

EasyGroup owns a large number of registrations to trademarks featuring the word ‘easy’

Many ‘easy’ trademarks

The trademarks that EasyGroup objected to were: Easy Meubles, Easy Pets, EasyMarkets and Easy Security, each of which had been registered by different applicants. The company therefore filed four separate oppositions with the European Trademark Office EUIPO based on its own registered ‘easy’ trademarks, of which it owns nearly 150 in the EU.

No monopoly

But EUIPO rejected EasyGroup’s exclusive claim to the word ‘easy’, stating that the word was a purely descriptive indicator meaning ‘something that is not difficult’. Although it accepted that EasyJet was a trademark with a reputation, this was not a reason for the company to claim an absolute monopoly to the word ‘easy’. In the first two weeks in April, then, EasyGroup lost all four cases, and Easy Meubles, Easy Pets, EasyMarkets and Easy Security were all upheld.

Trademarks remain valid: EasyGroup told it can’t claim exclusive rights to the word ‘easy’

Call it a day!

This is by no means the first blog we’ve written about claims lost by EasyGroup, and all these defeats aren’t exactly strengthening its legal position. Our advice to EasyGroup? Call it a day, stop all these pointless claims to the word ‘easy’ and invest your money and energy in genuine disputes.

Bas Kist