The world’s leading digital payment solution provider PayPal has filed a trademark violation lawsuit against music streaming service provider Pandora for mimicking its logo. The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, mentions that Pandora’s new logo, the letter “P”, is a copy of the plaintiff’s logo design which features two Ps. It further mentions that striking resemblance between the two logos has caused serious confusion in the mind of users and they have started to mistake Pandora for PayPal which is proving to be a threat to their users experience.
To back its claims, PayPal has mentioned a number of social media posts from different users as examples of the confusion. In these examples (screenshots below), it can easily be noticed that users are opening Pandora when they intend to use PayPal for completing transactions or any other purposes. The same thing is happening in opposite way which means some users are opening PayPal when they want to play music on Pandora. In the lawsuit, PayPal has specifically mentioned that “one critically important function of the PayPal Logo is to stand out on the crowded screens of customers’ smartphones and tablets.” Talking about similarities in two logos, it said that Pandora is copying all “central features” of its logo which include capital Ps with a distinctive, block-style sans serif type and no hole in the P’s top part. It even put question marks over Pandora’s profitability aspects and mentioned that “Pandora deserted its longstanding logo and latched itself on to the increasingly popular PayPal Logo as part of its efforts to catch up to its competition.”
Pandora introduced the new logo last year as part of the redesign of the overall brand image. It was at the same time it announced premium Pandora Plus service which offers on-demand music to members. While the lawsuit has now been filed, PayPal said it was never the first intention and it did try to talk with Pandora privately as soon as it noticed the confusion users were facing. But in response, music streaming app’s officials did not take any action which forced it to take the matter to the court. With this lawsuit, PayPal is hoping that court will pass an order which will prevent Pandora from using the logo. On the other hand, Pandora is yet to comment anything on the matter.
