Portfolio of Russian to English scientific translations: we’ve added translations of two Russian scientific articles, this time in the field of Electrical Engineering.

Portfolio of Russian scientific journals search: another two Russian scientific articles found and delivered to our patron.

I’m not making it a point to post here a scientifically precise data :), so I do not have handy start-end date of the data range processed - roughly, it was 2 month period of 2008 (February-March).

As always, the leader is United States of America - US companies filed registration of 87 marks.

OK, let’s see…companies which already have strong presence in Russia have been firming it even more with registering more and more marks:

4 by jimi hendrix (hendrix,authentic hendrix,experience hendrix,jimi hendrix) - hey Jimi, nice to see ya in Russia you’d never been before to!
3 by Xerox (xerox premier,xerox office,xerox exclusive)
1 by Gillett (showerpod)
1 by Procter & Gamble (seduisante)
1 by Mary Kay (beauty that counts)
1 by Herbalife (h3o pro)
2 by Colgate (colgate enamel protect)
1 by IBM (stop talking start doing)
1 by Bell Corp (racer)
1 by Calvin Klein underwear
1 by Universal Studios (universal channel)

Some more well known names I can’t recall (or forgot to write down) owners of:
lucky strike (I’m aware that this was the essense of American Spirit, no? Welcome to wild wild Russia old fellow!)
tide absolute (is it P&G?)
lenor summer day (is it P&G?)
old spice (is it P&G?)
cadillac (is it P&G too? …just kidding)
pizza hut
red bull

One of the most prolific trade mark registrars from US is Illinois Tool Works - they’ve been filing hulluva lots of marks in Russia.
And just for fun, here’s unsorted list of marks recently filed by US companies:

subtile,silite,devtube,2ton 2 ton,tru-bond,dev pack,fasmetal,franklynn industries,diamondkote,korrosflex,plexus,spectrasensors,oster,
restasis,ma310,ma320,ultimatic,ma3940lh,enmotion,ultima,relayfax,nd’s space,bd aqueo premium,georgia-pacific,zingspot,florange, nutrafruit,st-246,siga,kf,korn/ferry international,equifax,densit,densiphalt,ducorit,eukanuba make a good dog great,hammer+sickle,
k&w,nars,ml material london,style & co,fomrez,intermune,aspire fund,pars aspire fund,fittipaldi,lamiglas,tsc,snp,quick descent,quick pump in,clover, speed,nars,fury,geographix,banana republic

28 marks:
Japan

About half of the filed for registration in Russia japanese marks belong to well known in Russia companies:
Honda: honda pilot
Matsushita: motion focus technology
Epson: epson photo fine premia
Citizen: citizen cxw,citizen cxh
Seiko: greenmethod
Nissan: nissan gt-r,skyline,silvia,350z, gtr,370z
Daiken: daiken
Mazda: mazda

The rest of the marks I never heard about - my guess is all of these are new, but I might be perfectly wrong and some of these might have a hundred years history back in Japan :): oppen,prostaff,tough under force tuf display,chergui,crystal snow,smartmesh,fractal tube,sofy,y.s.park,style works,style & co,tools of the trade,capcom

21 marks:
China (I’ll comment on these marks in my next post re possible trade mark infridgement)

16 marks:
UK
Among these 16 marks there are few already well established in Russia names such as Sobranie (tobacco) and Bentley, and I can see Sela filing thru UK couple of marks: sela softwear and sela extreme. Funny thing is that the Sela company is based in Israel and all clothes are labelled “made in China”. Sela boasts a network of popular affordable sportwear/casual clothes shops throughout Russia.

14 marks:
France
I can see three main tendencies in filing French marks:
1) some come in Cyrillics only (4 out of 14) (hmm, same number as for German registrars…interesting coincidence)
2) distinctively French sounding cliches, like baron de francois, l’officiel voyage, meribelle or la revue des montres
3) names sounding as they could have been hailing from any other country, like malvin, wilfactin, betafact and pullman hotels and resorts

11 marks:
Netherlands (filed mostly by International companies, modifications of well-known in Russia marks: axe by Unilever,Fruittella, Dove (soap).
Germany (4 out of 11 were filed in Cyrillic only)
Spain (My favorite among eleven Spanish marks is contrabandista)

10 marks:
Swiss (there was one filed by Nestle and two filed by tobacco company)

7 marks:
Canada

6 marks:
Finland
Iran (funny thing is, none of the filed marks sound distinctively Middle Eastern - they are quite dumb machine generated names, like
ave, home plus,golrang, o2, cloritex, whitex)
Austria (mm packaging,teadit,supertrans,variotrans,ruslan,metago)
Italy (kmb bank, esseti, .normaluisa, albina, monurelle...)

4 marks:
Estonia (4 modifications of aeroc)
Taiwan (gainward,mali,onpin,eee box)

3 marks:
Korea (pace,hyper,myway) - former two by Samsung
India (rosart tz, socalm, tata nano)
Cyprus (viaggio italiano, tsar-kvas, bering)
Belize (some company decided to claim three kinds of ways - eastway, westway and freeway, both in Latin and Cyrillic symbols)
Denmark (two marks in Cyrillics and one of the most recognized Danish brands - bang & olufsen’s bioline)
Brasil (rhinobaby,penalty,stara)
Sri Lanka (montegree,nature’s harmony)
Luxemburg (diamond cellular,diamond elixir,nutri calm)
Sweden (macrolane,castorx capital,superfect)
Turkey (sunset swimwear,pilsa,monica ricci) - ok, we’ll be await for a line of pseudo-italian women fashion/swimwear.
Israel (tiny love,tosaf,gci)

2 marks:
Columbia (fussione, nuestra tele)
Ireland (cystystat, cystistat)
Mexico (esperanto (that’s tequila), la morena)
Norway (norlife, vikingomega3)

1 mark:
Hungary (coberon chronos)
Cayman Islands (rumalaya)
Seychelles (alessandro manzoni) - well, we’ll be await for yet another line of pseudo-italian shoes or clothes.
Indonesia (sakura)
Sultanate of Oman (amouage)
Qatar (qinvest)
Singapore (rock)
Portugal (topcer industria de ceramica lda)
Czech (thun hotel & restaurant)
Vietnam (ngoc linh)
Thailand (cpf)

Our customer was interested in getting one Russian patent and two articles from Russian scientific journals, and he wanted these possibly translated into English. He came to the right place! Not only we found the articles for him (as mentioned in previous post, it was delivered super fast), but we also translated all three documents within a week (take a look at our updated portfolio of Russian to English translations).

Another customer sought to obtain an old Soviet patent ( USSR Inventor’s Certificate), and we encountered an interesting problem - full text of the document was not available through RUPTO paid database, the entry was blanc. We turned to our CD-ROM collection, but again this document was not available in full - entry contained only Abstract. So we had to request the document from archives. Luckily, it took RUPTO arhievists merely a week to locate a paper copy.

And another interesting task we embarked on last week was delivery of an article written in Russian language but published not in Russia - it was an Ukrainian reference. To much of our satisfaction, we managed to track it down - it took us slightly more time than usual, 5 business
days instead of our regular 2-3 days. We added it to our portfolio of Russian scientific journals search.

This request came from our US patron who began to order through Patents from RU articles not only in Russian, but in other languages as well - this Ukrainian reference (supposedly it must have been published in Ukrainian, at least title suggested so) became 2nd inquiry, first was request to find 2 Polish referencies. I enjoyed the hunt a lot! I had to browse many Polish resources, and 1st of Polish documents was found in its native country, but in the end I spotted the 2nd article via - surprise - US source, located not far from where are patron resides

I just love document detective job. You got some, feel free to contact me.

All in all, it’s another nice attempt to make a specialized patent meta-search engine recently I’ve also seen Patent Bar toolbar and some kind of Squidoo lens to name just a few. While Prior Smart have its merits (e.g. I was able to easily locate IT patent of an italian inventor I’ve been in touch on regard of licensing patent in Russia lately), it certainly does have it’s limitations, which have been known for ages - that be lame national PTO sites.

I tried a search on Russian patents (in fact, I wanted to locate a Russian patent granted to inventor from Italy) and spotted two issues:

1) Prior Smart submits query to RU.Espacenet server and NOT directly to RUPTO site (even despite RUPTO site been lame, it’d make sense to refer to original source, not to a mirror). More to this - RU.Espacenet server data is limited to past 1994 Russian patents only, all pre-1994 Russian (that is Soviet/USSR) patents remained out of reach.

2) Russian PTO has a fanny habit of double transliteration (from Latin to Cyrillic and from Cyrillic back to Latin character set) of foreign inventors’ names which might ruin original name completely. That’s what happened in my search attempt exactly. I do not want to reveal real name I was searching on, but for example it might look like this:

Foreign applicant’s name: Inventor OH JANG-KEUN (KR)

after double transliteration -

Inventor information: OKh Dzang-keun (KR)

So, do you think I’d succeed in locating OH JANG-KEUN in Russian patents?
Hint: no, I would fail, cause OH JANG-KEUN is unknow to RUPTO, it knows only OKh Dzang-keun .

Owner of 262ventures.com blog said yesterday:

In an ideal world, making it easier to know what prior art exists across the world, should prevent, proverbially, ¦the reinvention of the wheel.· For example, there are probably tons of interesting invention buried in the Swedish patent office. But because I can·t read Swedish, I won·t even bother to look.

Same for Russian. Sadly, PriorSmart didnt succeed in making it easier by now.

PS today I updated our portfolio of most recent Russian scientific and medical articles search - this time we achieved mindblowing 2 hours turnaround, that truly deserves to be put into Guinness book of records - I wonder if they mind starting a book of patent world records

Today I was given a sealed blanc DVD-R disc - a friend just wanted me to burn recent photos for him.
I was about to rip plastic open, but then a got a familiar feeling again - “what’s wrong with that Hugo Boss logo on disc? Why does it miss H?”
Suddenly, I realised what I never in my life came across anything by Hugo Boss except frargancies, watches, clothes and …is that it?
OK, anyways, I definitely never in my lifetime seen a DVD-R disc made by Hugo Boss.

At closer inspection, the surface of the disc appeared boasting a familiar picture - whoa! isn’t it infamouse Hugo (pronounced in Russian as “Ougo” and transcribed as “Ugo”) Chaves?!
Immediately, the devilish wit of counterfeiters became clear

Of course, holder of Hugo Boss trademark (RU 247287, registered on juegos para poker pcpoker gratis descargarstrip poker pcpoker pagina,poker pagina internet,poker pagina webjugar a poker gratisseven card stud en lineareglas texas holdemwww poli poquerparadisepoker,paradisepoker.com,paradise pokerstreap poker onlinepoker por internet gratisstip poker gratispai gow poker portal web,pai gow poker portales internet,pai gowjugar poker gratispoker freedownload games poker gratisbonos poquerstip poker onlinejugar seven card stud,jugar card stud en linea,7 card studjuegos polly pokerpoker torneos gratisjuegos de poli pokerpoker 5 cartasbonus pokercaribbean poker pagina webcaribbean poker portales webpoker game,poker pc game,simple three player poker gamepoker texas gratisjugar 7 card stud gratisjuego cartas pokerpoker omahapoker flash gratispoker portal webamerican pokerpolli poquerjuego cartas,jugar poker online,juego pokerjuegos de poker online gratismultiplayer poker gamepoker internet gratispoker texas holdem gratisvideo poker onlinecasino internacional internetapostar jugar onlinejuego casino portal internetjuego portal,juego portal web,juegos portal internetbaccarat downloaddorado hotel casinoroulette portales webcasino virtual pagina internetjuegos seguros linea 2003.05.27) couldnt not claim trademark infrigement, cause in Russia it’s registered only in 3 Nice classes (14, 35 and 42) which do not cover magnetic media, so this case does not fall under my regulat trademark watch service issues, I just wanted to share with you a funny picture

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.

Another two articles from Russian scientific journals were resqued from debris of paper archives and given new digital life - upon request for search from our new customer we found and delivered these two documents:

1) Kosachev I.P., Romanov G.V., Plotnikova I.N., Petrova L.M.
Bitumen showings of the rocks of crystalline basement in Tatarstan according to data of Bavlinskaya (N 20020) and Novo-Elkhovskaya (N20009) wells //
Perspectives of oil/gas capacity of crystalline basement on Tatarstan territory and in the Volgo-Kama region. Kazan: New Knowledge, 1998.- P.58-62.

2) “Cyclic nitroureas: synthesis and properties”
Zhilin, V.F.; Rudakov, G..F.; Sinditskii, v.P.; Egorshev, V. Yu; veselova,
Vol.1 p.39-51 2002

It took us 2 and 3 business days respectively to track these articles, arrange it to be scanned and then deliver to our customer as PDF files.

This time though bibliography provived was quite scarce - e.g. about 1st reference our customer knew only following:

BITUMEN SHOWINGS OF THE ROCKS..
KOSACHEV, I
58-62 1998

Still it was enough to track the article down. And I especially enjoy such a document detective service :).

IPD Group, which runs Russiatoday.com, said in a statement Wednesday that it had sent letters to U.S. cable providers Comcast and Intelsat, among others, demanding that they pull Russia Today from the air because of trademark infringement.

The U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office refused to register Russia Today a trademark last month because Russiatoday.com had rights to the name.

Russia Today brushed off the provisional ruling, calling it “part of normal procedure.” The channel, which received notification from the U.S. body on April 24, has six months to prove it is a “unique brand,” a channel spokeswoman said Thursday. “We don’t believe we have broken any rules,” she said. “This process is just a matter of time.”

The English-language satellite channel was launched by the state in 2005 to improve Russia’s image abroad. Russiatoday.com was set up in 1996 as a clearinghouse for Russia-related news.

An Intelsat spokesman said the company would not comment until it received “full information.” Comcast could not be reached for comment.

Brigid Quinn, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Patent and Trademarks Office, said possible trademark infringements are argued in court “on a case-by-case basis.” “It is up to the company that has a registered trademark to incite legal proceedings,” Quinn said.

Last year Russiatoday.com said it had been asked by Russia Today to prove that it had authorization from the Russian government to use the word “Russia” in its name. In May 2006, the State Duma passed a law forbidding Russian nonstate media organizations from using the word “Russia” in their names.

Q: We have a trade show coming up where we will launch our new product. In anyone’s advice do you suggest we time it so that the trademark is filed only say a few days prior to the show in order for it not to be picked up by a competitor on the USPTO site. Or, on the other hand to be safe, should we just have this filed before we start spending on marketing material etc.

My colleague Susan Crane replied:

…I would file as soon as possible. You do not want to run the risk that a mark is clear today, you wait until a
tradeshow to file the applications, and in the meantime, someone has filed a confusingly similar application.

I agree with Susan. Here is a most recent case which confirms this point of view (I’m speaking of Russian trademarks, but anyways…)

On January 17th we got a request from New York advertising agency who needed a search conducted to see if an advertising tagline has been trademarked in Russia in 2 classes.

Regular search of Russian trademark database brought in exact match, BUT it turned out what the mark expired 6 months ago.
However, we strongly advised our client not to limit search to registered marks only, and search Russian trademark applications as well (they’re unavailable at RUPTO online for searching but we maintain our own database). Results were unassuring - on December 20th (that is less than 30 days prior to receiving inquiry from out client) that mark was filed again (by the same company)…

So, as you can see, our US client might have had a good chance to snap the mark if only they thought of it a little bit earlier - to my mind, you’d better file the application as soon as possible.

BTW, in Russia it’s tougher than is US - our client had a real good chance to get the mark despite the fact that it was already in use - Russia uses the “first-to-file” policy.
- No evidence of use is required upon filing of a trademark application.
- The rights to the mark will belong to the person who files the application first…even if a mark was used for a long time in Russia by another company.

PS I came across (via Sphere) Seattle Trademark Lawyer blog - Michael Atkins published an overview (1st part actually) of Foreign Trademark Law Blogs. He points out that there’s a wealth of trademark law information out there, and it’s not limited to materials written in English. and tells about couple of translation websites he uses to read those foreign blogs. I’ve been using translations websites for these very purposes over a course of years, too, and totally agree with Michael that foreign resources (in my case non-Russian) help to spot developments that may have gone unnoticed and highlight resources that allow for additional investigation. I’ll be looking forward for Pt.2 of the overview.