Opinion ID: 771716
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Factors Relating to Actual Confusion

Text: 151 As a matter of intuition, one would expect that in a reverse confusion claim, evidence of actual confusion would be as important as in a direct confusion claim, though the nature of the confusion that would be probative would be quite different. See Lang v. Retirement Living Publ'g Co., 949 F.2d 576, 583 (2d Cir. 1991) (holding that evidence of actual confusion in which the public thought the senior user was the origin of the junior user's products was irrelevant for a reverse confusion claim). As applied to this case, for example, evidence that consumers thought that The Miracle Bra was an A&H product would be probative on a direct confusion claim, but not on a reverse confusion claim. Conversely, evidence that consumers thought that Miraclesuit was a Victoria's Secret product would support a reverse confusion claim, but not a direct confusion claim. This was apparently the District Court's intuition; although it declined to consider A&H's reverse confusion claim, it did observe that most of the evidence A&H had put forth with regard to actual confusion related to direct, rather than reverse, confusion. See A&H IV, 57 F. Supp. 2d at 178 n.32. 152 However, marshalling evidence of actual confusion is often difficult. See, e.g., Liquid Glass Enters., Inc. v. Dr. Ing. h.c.F. Porsche AG, 8 F. Supp. 2d 398, 403 (D.N.J. 1998). In our view, if we were to create a rigid division between direct and reverse confusion evidence, we would run the risk of denying recovery to meritorious plaintiffs. For example, if a plaintiff alleged theories of both direct and reverse confusion and was able to prove a few instances of actual confusion in each direction, we might conclude that the plaintiff did not have enough evidence of either type to succeed on either of its claims, even though, taken together, all of the evidence of actual confusion would be probative of a real problem. As we explained in Part V.B.3, supra, the manifestation of consumer confusion as direct or reverse may merely be a function of the context in which the consumer first encountered the mark. Isolated instances of direct confusion may occur in a reverse confusion case, and vice-versa. See Long & Marks, supra, at 5. Though we might expect that, in most instances, the consumer's first encounter will be with the mark that has greater commercial strength, this will not invariably be the case. 153 Given the problems litigants typically encounter in locating evidence of actual confusion, then, we decline to create a strict bar to the use of direct confusion evidence in a reverse confusion case, or vice versa. However, evidence working in the same direction as the claim is preferred, and misfitting evidence must be treated carefully, for large amounts of one type of confusion in a claim for a different type may in fact work against the plaintiff. For instance, the existence of reverse confusion might disprove a plaintiff's claim that its descriptive mark has secondary meaning, thus resulting in no recovery at all. See Jefferson Home Furniture Co, Inc. v. Jefferson Furniture Co., Inc., 349 So.2d 5, 8 (Ala. 1977). 154 It follows that the other factor relating to actual confusion, Lapp factor (4), examining the time the mark has been used without evidence of actual confusion, should be approached similarly.