CARSON CITY – Visa, the financial giant that has issued 750 million credit cards, is safe from infringement on its name by a one-man business whose address is in Las Vegas.
The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that James Orr can't use the name of eVisa to run his multilingual education and information business on the Internet.
The court Monday upheld a decision from U.S. District Judge Larry Hicks, who issued a summary judgment in favor of Visa International Service Association against JSL Corp.
Orr, who runs his business out of an apartment in New York City, traces the name eVisa back to an English language tutoring service called “Eikaiwa Visa” that he ran while living in Japan. Eikaiwa is Japanese for English conversation, and the ”e” in eVisa is short for Eikaiwa.
The decision was written by Judge Alex Kozinski, who said Visa was a strong trademark that “draws on positive mental associations with travel visas, which make potentially difficult transactions relatively simple and facilitate new opportunities and experiences.”
The court said Visa “also introduced uncontroverted evidence that Visa is the world’s top brand in financial services and is used for online purchases almost as often as all other credit cards combined.”
The court said the “more unique or arbitrary a mark, the more protection a court will afford it.”
Visa registered its mark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1977.
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