Update: The Supreme Court denied certiorari on Feb. 23, 2026 (docket (opens in new tab)), so the Ninth Circuit’s memorandum stands.
I have been thinking about World Champ Tech, LLC v. Peloton Interactive, Inc., No. 24-2266, 2025 WL 2673906 (9th Cir. Sept. 18, 2025) (amended mem.), because a short, nonprecedential memorandum rearranges how a familiar doctrine plays out. The memorandum tells an old story in a new setting, and in doing so, it makes a house-mark issue feel like a UI problem.
Here is the quick orientation. World Champ Tech owns “BIKE+” for a cycling-metrics app. Peloton later released a home exercise bike called the “Peloton Bike+.” The dispute proceeds as a reverse-confusion case, meaning the concern is that the junior user’s scale erases the senior’s identity. The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Peloton. So far, so ordinary. But the way the panel handled the house-mark issue is where things get interesting.
House Marks in the Abstract vs. House Marks in the App Store
In reverse-confusion cases, a dominant house mark can aggravate confusion. The intuition is simple: the junior brand is so loud that it drowns out the senior. That principle appears throughout the case law, and the Ninth Circuit acknowledged it. Then it pivoted. The panel concluded this was not a case where a house mark aggravated confusion.
Why not? Context. The memorandum emphasized where consumers mostly encounter World Champ’s mark since it stopped paid advertising in 2019: the Apple App Store. It also emphasized what the App Store makes salient: the developer name. The Peloton app does not use “Bike+” at all, and the Bike+ listing tells the consumer it comes from World Champ Tech. In that setting the developer name does the source-identifying work, and a loud house mark has little confusion left to aggravate.
This gets at something I keep returning to: in modern trademark disputes, the “similarity of the marks” factor is a comparison filtered through the mechanics of how people actually find, click, and buy things.
A Gentle Nudge from the Cert Petition
I will mention, gently, that the cert petition (opens in new tab) cites empirical work I have done on confusion factors, Doctrine, Data, and the Death of DuPont (opens in new tab), now published at 36 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L.J. 678 (2026). The petition uses it for a specific point: mark similarity and proximity of goods “predict likelihood of confusion outcomes 99% of the time,” so without the panel’s framing both would have favored World Champ. It also quotes my line that “[w]hat courts celebrate as flexible contextualization, litigants experience as outcome uncertainty.”
The Ninth Circuit’s move here shows that contextualization at work. The court measured similarity “as [the marks] are encountered in the marketplace.” In that marketplace, the developer name tells consumers who made each app. So the same doctrinal principle (house marks can aggravate reverse confusion) yields a different practical result.
That is worth sitting with, because it reveals how much doctrinal “flexibility” actually lives in context.
The Curious Part
In reverse-confusion cases a dominant house mark can hurt the junior user, and the petition calls that the majority rule. The panel said it did not hurt Peloton here, and the cert petition reads the memorandum as going further, treating Peloton’s house mark as the reason the marks were dissimilar. On that reading, context reversed the valence of the factor. In some environments, a house mark is a megaphone. In others, it is a label on the bottle.
If you are litigating in platform-based markets, that distinction is outcome-relevant. The best way to argue a house-mark problem in 2026 probably involves screenshots, search results, and the concrete flows through which consumers actually encounter brand identifiers.
Where This Leads, Practically
For practitioners, the lesson is a familiar one with a modern twist: build the record around the encounter context. If the dispute lives in the App Store, make the App Store the evidence. If it lives in a marketplace interface, capture the marketplace interface. If it lives in a streaming platform or search results, show the flow. The question a court will eventually answer (does the house mark aggravate reverse confusion?) may be decided by where that mark appears and what else appears beside it.
For researchers, the empirical work bears on the proposition World Champ pressed in its cert petition: in about 4,000 TTAB decisions, a rule using only similarity and relatedness matched the outcome in more than 99% of 4,651 mark comparisons (one decision can compare more than one pair of marks). That is Board data under DuPont, and the Ninth Circuit applies its own eight factors, so the fit is suggestive. The panel held that relatedness favored World Champ. If the panel had not used this contextual logic to reframe how similarity works in an app-store environment, the case would have been much closer. The panel also counted purchaser care and actual confusion for Peloton. It treated the 12% net-confusion survey as the kind of mid-range result that needs support, and found none: hundreds of users had downloaded World Champ’s app over years of coexistence, with no evidence that any of them was confused. The App Store drove the purchaser-care holding too, along with World Champ’s own statement to the USPTO that its app “is not acquired through impulse”: the panel pointed to the multi-step download and the developer name on the listing. So the app-store framing informed two of the three factors that went against World Champ.
One More Thing
If you want a case that illustrates how much modern trademark doctrine is about encounter design, World Champ Tech v. Peloton is a good one. The place where consumers met the marks did the work.
Prof. Reichert