Novartis sells BENEFIBER is a container that looks like this:

benefiber

It owns a registration for the configuration of the container. The drawing in the registration looks like this:

benefiber drawing

The mark is described in the registration as:

. . . the design of a cylindrical bottle, the bottle having tapered sides near the top of the bottle, and on the bottle, a circular banner featuring the wording “BENEFIBER” and “FIBER SUPPLEMENT”, the design of spoon containing powder, and curved lines indicating motion. The broken lining indicating a lid is not part of the mark but is merely intended to show the position of the mark.

Renew Life is a competitor. It used to sell its FIBERSMART product in a container that looked like this:

fibersmart old

Last year, Novartis had a manufacturing problem that interrupted the supply of BENEFIBER. Although Novartis is ramping up production, for now there seem to be shortages. Renew Life has run ads that look like this:

cant find benefiber

and have changed the container of FIBERSMART to look like this:

fibersmart

so Novartis filed a lawsuit that looks like this:

novartis v renew life
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