Cloud services and G-Cloud provider Skyscape Cloud Services (Skyscape) has rebranded after losing a court case involving British broadcaster Sky. Skyscape, which has headquarters in Farnborough, United Kingdom, bills itself as “service provider of choice for the UK Public Sector”. The company offers a range of services including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) options. The company went to court to address claims it had infringed on Sky’s registered trademark of ‘Sky’.This is not the first time the broadcaster – home of SkyNews – had been in court to to address trademark issues. In 2014 mighty Microsoft was forced to change the name of its then new SkyDrive cloud storage platform to OneDrive as a result of a court case involving Sky. However, in this most recent case Skyscape instigated proceedings in a bid to ascertain “commercial certainty” about the use of its name. The court demanded that Skyscape change its name to avoid infringing on Sky’s trademark and from Monday 1 August 2016 it will go by its new name.
“There is a likelihood that a significant proportion of the relevant public and thus the average consumer, encountering the sign 'Skyscape' used for an email service, would take it to be yet another service offered by Sky,” explained the Judge in the case, Judge Richard Hacon in his ruling. “If the average consumer was already familiar with Sky email, he or she would probably take it to be a replacement or modified Sky email service. Consequently, Skyscape has not proved that the SKY Mark would not be infringed pursuant to art.9(1)(b) by the use of 'Skyscape' for email services.”
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