Companies like Coca-Cola, which values its brand name at $34 billion, take a very dim view of trademark infringement.
So I’d better say this in the very beginning of my post: “These materials are presented here for private educational, scholarly, and research uses”, OK?

While Russian bombers continue routine patrol missions over the Atlantic Ocean, we continue our routine trademark watch patrol missions over trademark applications recently filed with Russian Patent Office.

Yesterday, while sorting through our own database of Russian trademark applications, I came across a drawing which struck my mind as resembling something quite familiar…”wait, what was that?” I thought to myself… hmm, looks like a Coca-Cola’s BonAqua. To be certain, I retrieved all BonAqua marks from RUPTO database, and whoa!

Funny thing is, that RusAqua mark was filed the very next day after BonAqua sign got registered (but not the date it was published, so it’s a pure coincidence).

RusAqua

Filed 24/oct/2007 by company from Nizhny Novgorod (where Coca-Cola has one of the largest bottlers companies in Russia).

Bonaqua

Registered in Russia by Coca-Cola Company (US)
Priority date: 2004.10.25
Registration date: 2006.10.23
Published: 2006.12.12

So, the question is – is that RusAqua confusingly similar to BonAqua mark registered by Coca-Cola? We have to wait to see whether RusAqua makes it to Official Gazette (I’ll post update later), but anyways – what’s considered to be confusingly similar?

Coca-Cola is so big, it gets mentioned in all and every trademark infrigement case studies.
For instance, Crashcourse says following on regard of “Use for similar goods or services“:

The most common type of trademark infringement probably occurs when somebody else sells a product or service under a name that in some way resembles a registered trademark, and the products in question are the same or similar to the registered products.

The main criterion here is whether the name of the product is confusingly similar to the trademark. If they are, then potential buyers might accidentally buy the wrong product, and that is exactly the kind of situation that trademark law was designed to prevent.

Determining whether two things are confusingly similar is very complex. The label of the product in question must be compared to the trademark as a whole. Even if certain elements do correspond (for example the same type of graphical symbols are used, and the various elements are arranged in a similar way) the total impression might still be different. And it is the total impression that is important, because consumers will rarely pay attention to details when making a selection of a product.

Two products are considered similar if the public would be of the opinion that the services or goods in question are of the same company or of economically linked companies… Of course, the more famous a trademark becomes, the bigger the chance that the public’s opinion would change. The trademark Coca Cola for example appears on many different products, ranging from T-shirts to duvets. Given this information, the public would easily think that somebody selling pillows with the Coca Cola trademark on it had something to do with the Coca Cola company. Based on this, the trademark holder can act against such use of his trademark.

But even Coca-Cola itself cannot avoid trademark infrigement completely, the classic exmaple would it Coca-Cola Zero launch campaign. No, I’m not talking about famous viral video “Coke sues Coke Zero for Infringement”, although it’s pretty funny by itself (if you dont get it, this is a joke, Coke is owned by the same people who make Coke Zero. They wouldn’t sue themselves, even for such a funny thing as “taste infringement” might be

I’m talking about Zero – there was dispute over the Zero name. As mentioned in Wikipedia, in Norway the Brewery Ringnes claimed that Bryggeriforeningen owns the right to Zero name. The Zero name was used on a non alcoholic beverage from 1972 to 1996.

So despite of being one of the most expensive trademarks in the world and succesfully catching up with recent trends (like becoming Coca-Cola 2.0 and supposedly “releasing” their trademark for Second Life use), it cannot completely secure itself against trademark pirates popping up in third world countries like Russia (but something tells me what Russia is not that much thrid-worldy anymore…My guess is what Russian market is one of the largest for Coca-Cola).

Coca-cola is yet to turn to our service, but they’d better not to wait too long

PS re copyright infringement and most expensive trademarks in the world… Wired recently blogged on quite a thought provoking theme “Is Copyright Infringement So Bad?” – “Where do we draw the line between artistic freedom and copyright infringement? As of now, and this is undeniable, those lines are drawn by legislators, and those legislators are paid by rich people, and copyright owners are rich.” Take a look at it.

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Foreign governments play a key role in fighting IP theft, but unfortunately, there is a wide variance in how countries are attacking the problems of counterfeiting and IP theft, according to a 30-nation study by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). The top performing countries are: U.S., UK, Germany and France. Also among the best performers, in descending order: Japan, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia.

Of course, to be any good, a decent article on IP theft must mentioned the main “bad guys” in the field –

At the other end of the spectrum, responders named China and Russia, respectively, as the two worst performing countries, followed by India, Brazil, Indonesia, Vietnam, Taiwan, Pakistan, Turkey and Ukraine.

“Study may seem to suggest that IP theft and counterfeiting is a well recognized problem, but in reality many firms are just coming to terms with it, says Brian Monks, vice president of anti-counterfeiting operations at safety certification organization Underwriters Laboratories (UL). And even if an organization hasn’t been victimized yet, chances are good it soon will be, he warns. Brand volume and good margins increase the risk.”

Author of the article is quite good at describing IP theft/counterfeiting as a combination of challenges – read entire article here.

But as it turns out, Russian counterfeiters may cause not only headaches to western companies – Slashdot writes:

“Author Paulo ‘Pirate’ Coelho leapt out of obscurity and onto the
best-seller list by giving away his books on the Net. The best-selling
author of ‘The Alchemist’ will even help you pirate his books via his
blog.

His publishers were not pleased, but then his books went from
selling 1,000 copies to 100,000 and then over a million. He gives special
credit to pirate translators who are making his work accessible to a
wider audience and convincing more people to read his book.”

In particular, Coelho denotes works of Russian pirates – he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more.

Coelho seems to be pretty enthusiastic about – he’s been actively posting to his blog, latest post is dated jan 23 and he announces what “I added more books in 7 different languages“.

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“As I was preparing to take up my new post, I was astonished at the disrespect for proprietary rights in the field of armaments,” Dmitry Rogozin told a news conference on Thursday.

“Copyright law should not be only confined to art and culture, but must also cover armaments,” he said.

He said many countries, including some NATO and European Union members, produced Kalashnikov weapons. “We will find out on what licenses and agreements the production and supply of our automatic weapons is based and how much money the Russian Federation has lost,” he added.

He said the arms plant Arsenal in Bulgaria had sold 10,000 AK-47 Kalashnikov automatic rifles to Turkmenistan in 1994 and 60,000 in 2005, as well as 40,000 to Iraq in 2003. The plant also supplied arms to Georgia, Afghanistan, Indonesia and United Arab Emirates under multimillion-dollar contracts, the official added.

Rogozin said the plant’s branch in the U.S. state of Nevada had also sold 10,000 Kalashnikov-based semi-automatic weapons and that a Polish foreign trade association had sold 10,000 Kalashnikov weapons to Iraq.

“The same concerns Hungary, Romania and others,” he said pointing that “these are respected countries, member states of NATO and the European Union.”

Rogozin said the issue would see “serious discussions” if it was established that these countries had produced the weapons illegally and without due payments to Russia.

Rogozin, who starts work at NATO’s HQ in Brussels on January 28, stressed that there were norms and restrictions to be complied with by all NATO and EU countries.

A former chairman of the lower house committee for foreign affairs, Rogozin was earlier considered a pro-Kremlin politician and held the post of presidential envoy to the Kaliningrad Region, a Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania. He also formerly led the nationalist bloc Rodina (Motherland).

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The amendments have been in preparation for five years. Rospatent began supplying the customs service with trademark information free of charge this month. Rospatent is the only agency in the country that is informed of and records all transactions involving trademarks, and its database contains “hundreds of thousands” of them, as one satisfied customs official described it. Customs brokers will be charged to access the Rospatent database.

Customs officials warn that when the Rospatent database becomes available, the customs clearance procedure may become slower, even for importers with genuine products.
www.kommersant.com

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2. Alleged copyright infringement under criminal investigation
Another case of violation of trade mark and copyrights is even more astonishing. The Avanta+ publishing house issues a series of “Encyclopaedia for Children”, the super cover of the edition was registered as a trademark. A former employee of the firm established another company and started to publish another edition “Encyclopaedia for children and youths”. After that “Avanta +” raised a civil and criminal suit. The editor of the second encyclopaedia was said to have infringed on copyright and trademark rights of Avanta+ and even spent several months in prison during the criminal investigation. Thanks to the activity of her lawyer she was released but the criminal case has not been decided yet.

3. Copyright infringement punished by a Russian court.
In summer this year there was another case of identified copyright infringement and sort of punishment for it. A book that was on sale was found to be an infringing copy, the right holders raised a civil suit, demanded to stop selling of the book and pay damages. The court considered the case, acknowledged the copyright infringement, ordered to terminate selling of the book and awarded damages. The infringer implemented all court rulings. This is a good part of the story, but the other part is not so positive.

The case was about one of Dale Carnegie’s famous works. The Russian translation of the work was published by a small publishing house somewhere in Belarus without any licence. The book was sold in a small book store in Moscow and it was against this store that the case was raised. The plaintiffs were the translators of the book into Russian (natural persons) who, according to the Russian Law, hold copyright for the translation. The awarded damages were ten minimal monthly wages – 800 roubles, about 130 dollars (this amount was demanded in the suit). So, nobody punished the publishers, the damages awarded were ridiculously small and infringement of copyright on the book as a whole held by Russian and US editors were not considered. So, the copyright infringements are treated in Russia very seriously now though much is still left to be done.

Source: PatSGr

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