Daring to prefix a company or even a pop group’s name with “easy” could land you in legal hot water, as the founder of British airline easyJet relentlessly tackles alleged trademark breaches.
Greek-Cypriot tycoon Stelios Haji-Ioannou, whose easyGroup still has links with the carrier, has set out to protect the “easy” brand by threatening court action against anyone deemed to be profiting from the name.
A formal complaint made by the man simply known as Stelios recently forced British indie pop band Easy Life, which also adorned posters with an aircraft showing a likeness to an easyJet plane, into changing its name. It chose Hard Life.
EasyGroup owns the licenses to several entities with the “easy” name. The pop band took to social media when EasyJet was suing it, saying it didn’t have the funds to defend itself in what could be a lengthy legal row.
To be sure, the airline group only filed its trademark application for the “Easylife” name in 2020—several years after the band was founded. However, easyGroup has sought to protect the “easy” prefix as it owns many businesses with similar names such as easyCinema and easyBooking.
‘Easy come, easy go’
“The problem with small brand thieves if they are left unchecked is that they become profitable and they grow,” an easyGroup spokesman told AFP in relation to numerous ongoing lawsuits.
“Most of these cases never come to open court as the brand thieves realise that they are in the wrong and make changes to the satisfaction of easyGroup,” he added.
Hard Life still gives a nod to its past, with the band’s account on X carrying the title message “easy come, easy go”.
Ahead of releasing a new song in June it wrote on the social platform: “Safe to say the last nine months haven’t been easy.”
EasyGroup and Stelios, who lives in Monaco, insist that their actions are in the interest of the consumer, to avoid confusion and preserve the company’s image.
The spokesman added that “most of easyGroup’s profits” go into the Stelios Philanthropic Foundation.
The easyGroup model sees it receive royalties from licensing its brand to third parties. It receives, for example, 0.25 percent of easyJet’s revenue, while the Haji-Ioannou family still owns 15 percent of the carrier.
Around 1,200 official “easy” brands exist, from gambling business easyBet to easyGym, easyHotel and dating site easyWoo—many of which exhibit the same typeface and orange/white colour scheme.
‘David and Goliath’
Unofficial “easy” companies contacted by AFP cited colossal legal fees as the reason for backing down and changing their names when pursued by easyGroup.
“As a small business it was incredibly hard to keep up financially with solicitor fees so for me I am happy to leave this behind me,” said Jozsef Spekker, owner of Stoke Jetwash.
The driveway-cleaning business was known as Easy Jetwash until August.
The new name takes the name of the city where his small business is based in central England.
An intellectual property law specialist at the London School of Economics, Luke McDonagh, described such cases as “David and Goliath battles”.
“Some people call this trademark bullying, where essentially Goliath takes a case against a David, a small company that really has no resources and cannot fight back,” he told AFP.
“It’s not just easyGroup, it would be wrong to single them out, a lot of big companies do this,” he added, citing Apple, L’Oreal and television broadcaster Sky as prime examples.
McDonagh believes easyGroup, whose branding extends to cruise company easyBoat and household-products firm easyCleaning, “has been going too far in taking so many cases against these small entities”.
“The purpose of trademark law is not to give an unlimited monopoly on a word. It might be different if it was an entirely made-up word, but ‘easy’ is such a common word in the English language that other companies need to be able to use it in a reasonable way.”
EasyGroup has enjoyed “many legal (trademark) victories over the years”, the spokesman said.
Even if it may not always seem like a fight between equals, Stelios has lost a few challenges over the brand’s name. In 2018, for instance, the group lost a case against car dealer Arnold Clark over the name of its payment system, Easy Pay.
Earlier this month, Easyfundraising, a nearly 20-year-old Staffordshire-based company, won a legal battle against EasyGroup along similar lines.
The High Court in London ruled in favour of online platform easyfundraising, which is hoping to recover around £1.0 million ($1.3 million) in legal fees, despite an appeal hanging over the company.
“It is telling that EasyGroup were not able to produce a single piece of evidence showing any customer confusion has ever existed,” Easyfundraising’s CEO James Moir told the BBC. Stelios, on the other hand, said he would appeal the decision as he was “disappointed” by it.
“It’s like a war of attrition, and they just hope that ultimately companies give in, because it’s too long, it’s too much hassle, it’s too expensive,” Moir told AFP.
