Q: Would KaNoot count as trademark infrigment on Kahoot!
Me and my friends decided that we would make a open source version of Kahoot! that also revolves heavily arround data privacy and ease of use. We dont store any data for an extended ammount of time and all accounts are generated with a key pair thats discarded after use. The quiz creation is never stored in our database and is read through the client side through copy and paste if you would like to share your quiz. We have no plans of monetizing KaNoot and are commited to open source to share the knowledge of coding as well as getting help with adding extra security. Our ”logo” features a cartooned version of pingu and the text Ka in black and Noot in orange. The text is in the font Arial and doesnt resemble the Kahoot! Logo. We chose the name KaNoot as Kahoot! has become synonymus with the word quiz and in no way to create confusion or to scam people in any way. We the KaNoot team would just like to know if we need to change the name of the website/webapp. Thanks!
A: My advice is to adopt a completely different and distinctive mark. KAHOOT! is a distinctive and arbitrary word mark, registered for a similar service and software as what you propose. As you admit, KAHOOT! has a strong association with the word quiz genre, so there is a substantial likelihood of confusion, and your open source and non-storage features do not mitigate that. Making design/font changes would not overcome this problem, as your proposed word mark is nearly identical.
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