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9th Circ. Revives Dropbox Smart Sync Trademark Fight
Law360 (April 20, 2021, 4:36 PM EDT) A split Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday revived a trademark lawsuit against Dropbox Inc. over a Smart Sync cloud storage product, drawing a rebuke from a dissenting judge who said the accuser s sophisticated buyers would not be confused by a similar name.
By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court overturned a 2019 decision by a district judge that tossed out the lawsuit, which accused Dropbox of infringing an earlier SmartSync software brand sold by a firm called Ironhawk Technologies Inc.
The trial judge had ruled that consumers were unlikely to confuse the two products, but the Ninth Circuit said that highly.