The standard ringing from an alarm clock or a telephone is too boring and banal to be registered as a trademark within the EU, a top court has ruled. The judgment was handed down by the EU General Court (EGC), blocking a Brazilian company that had tried to claim ownership of the sound.

In 2014, the Brazilian mass media company Grupo Globo applied to register the globally familiar "ring-ring" sound "for the dissemination of information electronically, orally, or by means of television"—guarding its use on all electronic devices and in media representations. They represented the sound using the following simple musical notation:

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) at the time refused to register the jingle on the grounds that it had "no distinctive character," and that it was "a banal and commonplace ringtone which would generally go unnoticed and would not be remembered by the consumer."

Globo—the biggest media company in Latin America—appealed EUIPO's decision at the EU General Court, which has today ruled that the sound is indeed too boring to register. The EGC, which sits alongside the EU Court of Justice (ECJ), hears actions against the various institutions of the European Union.

The EGC judgment held that distinctive sounds can be trademarked, provided that they may be represented graphically. However, because the ringtone sound is so familiar and so universal, the court decided that a general consumer in the European Union would be "unable, without prior knowledge, to identify that ringing sound as indicating that the goods and services come from Globo."

Even though they found that the sound could be represented—in this case as a repetition of two G-sharps—the court held "that it will generally go unnoticed and will not be remembered by the consumer."