Yoko Ono vs Yoko Mono

You’ve come up with a really cool name for your new bar or restaurant that reminds you of a famous brand or personality, but you’ve been crafty enough to twist it a bit or even come up with a killer pun? Strong! But dangerous.

You may have heard about the case that happened in Hamburg in 2017. Yoko Ono successfully took Hamburg’s trendy Yoko Mono Bar to court. The widow of Beatles singer John Lennon felt that the name of the bar was too similar to hers and there was a risk, customers assume here, that she would be the operator of the pub. The court saw it exactly in such a way, gave Yoko Ono right and forced the pub under threat of an order up to 250.000, – € to rename itself, AZ 318 O 195/17.
This will not happen to you with us! If you want to reopen or rename, or even if you need to, we’ll be happy to help.

You are well advised to use fantasy names, for example. A combination of the first syllables of your pets’ names. Also, it’s always a good idea to check the trademark register to see if your name, even if you’ve never heard it anywhere before, might already be taken. The database of the dpma (German Trademark and Patent Office) is actually very easy to use:
https://register.dpma.de/DPMAregister/marke/basis

Everyone has access here, can enter any name and see if someone before him already had the idea and had it protected. Here it’s also smart to play around a bit, changing or omitting individual letters, writing words together or separately, because as the example above shows, a single letter broke the popular pub’s neck.