Russian Patents Blog

As I’ve mentioned on this blog previously, among other things we’re involved with there is a document delivery service – that’s basically delivery of Russian patents and articles from Russian scientific journals. However, from time to time we were asked to deliver articles from non-Russian journals, and, surprisingly (for us in the first place…), success rate was about 95%.

During last year I’d been trying to collect document delivery requests data into a Excel file, and while I had some spare time during the holidays I analyzed collected data and revealed interesting facts I’m going to publish:

Total number of document delivery requests: 103
Requests for Russian articles: 34
Requests for non-Russian articles: 69 (that’s TWICE as much as compared with Russian articles, hmm…)
Average number of requests for document delivery: 9 per month
(BUT in December only we received 27 requests)

Top 3 foreign (that is non-Russian) articles requests:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech

Full list of foreign (that is non-Russian) articles delivery requests we fulfilled in 2009:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech
5 Croatia
4 Greece
3 Bulgaria
3 Serbia
3 Turkey
2 Slovakia
2 Ukraine
1 Armenia
1 Azerbajzhan
1 Belarus
1 Georgia
1 Germany
1 Hungary
1 Italia
1 Lithuania
1 Slovenia
1 Uzbekistan

Quite often we have to deal with insufficient data in citations. Here is few examples I’d like to share with you:

1. My patron wrote:
“I can’t locate the publication name so I am unable to determine the publication location. Is this something that you may be able to obtain?”
The publication in question was “Byul. Izobret. i Tovarnykh Znakov”. For me it was immediately clear that it’s in fact Official Gazette of the Russian patent office (“Byulleten’ Izobretenii i Tovarnykh Znakov” in full). So apparently it was a patent my patron was after – but it’s number was not available. Luckily, I knew year and title – so I could search the document in Russian patent database and locate few patents matching the criteria, and one of them was the necessary one.

2. My patron requested an article from journal titled “Chirurgia (Bucuresti)“. There were given all usual details – author, title, year, journal’s issue, pages – and previously I successfully delivered few articles from this very journal, so I went to check the necessary issue of the journal. But to my surprise, there was no such article published in this issue. I proceeded with search throughout entire archive of the journal – to no avail, such an article (and I tried concatenated title as well) was not found. I tried then to look it up by author – same result, search brought no matches. Hmm…so I had to do a bibliography search of my own, and it turned out that the citation was incorrect – the journal was not Romanian one (Chirurgia (Bucuresti), but instead it was an Italian journal with similar name:

CHIRURGIA
A Journal on Surgery
P.ISSN 0394-9508

Having found the correct citation, I was able to deliver requested article.

3. My patron asked to obtain a copy of an article published in a Russian newspaper. Data was sufficient – date, title, newspaper’s name, etc. – and even online archive of that Russian newspaper was available for search at the newspaper’s site. Strangely, requested article could not be found by search in the archive …In the end, I was able to retrieve full text of the article from a cache elsewhere – apparently, requested article was for some reason deleted from the newspaper’s archive – but once published on the Net information does not disappear tracelessly :), so we, infopros, can sometimes resurrect wiped bits of data 🙂

I love this kind of document detective work, so feel free to contact us with any – regular or mysterious 🙂 – document delivery requests, be that for Russian literature or non-Russian documents, we’ll give it our best try.

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Source: Russian patents blog

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Quintessence of the post: purchase Russian domains before you file for the trademark.

Some time ago there was a topic at INTA mailing list regarding Russian domains and tradmark filing – the topic was started by yours truly, so I’d like to share with you that I’ve gathered in the discussion.

My question was as following:

We file trademark applications in Russia on behalf of foreign companies,
and it occurred to me that it might be wise to register a domain in Russia simultaneously – to guard the mark being filed against trademark crooks.

Do you think it makes sense to register domains along with regular trademark registration?

Answers:

Yes, of course. And more importantly, if the domain name is not available then you might consider finding a new name to trademark.

We always make sure the domain is available and purchase it before we file for the trademark, just to make sure your scenario below doesn’t arise. You can always drop the domain later if you end up not using it.

When my clients apply to register trademarks, I always suggest that they may wish to register the TRADEMARK.com, TRADEMARK.co.uk, TRADEMARK.ru etc. domain name of countries where they will do business, or anticipate doing business. As you know, in most countries the cost of domain name registration is paltry compared to the cost of wrestling the domain away from a cybersquatter.

In that situation, I’d definitely say it would be a good idea to register
the DNs. They are probably very cheap, compared with trade marks.

In my opinion, that is an excellent idea if someone intends to conduct
business in Russia and needs the domain names.

And today I heard this bit of news:

Icann’s launch of domain names in non-Latin alphabets was applauded by bloggers this week. On Class 46, Sasha Yelnick provides some guidance to how the rules will work in Russia, where registration of new domains will start on November 16 and will be phased in gradually before being open to everyone in March next year.

Russian domains WHOIS (in English)

You can purchase necessary Russian domains directly at RU Center.

Filed under: registration of trade marks in Russia | 1 Comment »

Back in August 2009 we introduced an optional service – free trademark search in Russia. My opinion on what free search is good for is known and well worded directly at the page we offer the service at.

Since August we received only one inquiry for free search in Russian trademarks (as compared to tens of inquiries for regular Russian trademark search) – and results of the free search only cemented my opinion that free trademark search in Russia being total and complete waste of time and totally misleading.

Here is the story – rather short, and structured in the table for your convinience.

So, effectively, a $150 search saved out client US$735 in filing fees – cause if they’d file just based on the results of the free search, Russian Patent and Trademark Office would turn the application down due to the fact that confusingly similar application was already filed.

But that’s not all – now, the most intriguing part of the story…I wondered what company happened to file an application for exactly the same word in exactly the same class? I googled the company’s name (say, THECOMPANY LLC) up and found out that domain in the email address my client sent the inquiry from had been registered in the name of…THECOMPANY LLC.

Anyways, as my client mentioned in his followup email, all’s well that ends well.

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Source: Russian patents blog

Filed under: registration of trade marks in Russia | No Comments »