Russian Patents Blog

Patents from RU news

December 3, 2007

We’ve just added Russian patent translations portfolio page. We are going to publish our most recent translations to let our potential customers evaluate quality of Russian patent translation service we offer.

We’d appreciate any feedback on whether this proves helpful or doesnt make any sense.

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We started posting articles on trademarks matters in Russia, here is a list of recent ones:

• Russian Trademark Pirates forced Starbucks to delay launch of coffeehouses in Russia for almost 10 years
• Is where a better way of spotting whether a mark that looks like an
  invented word might mean something in another language?
• Someone’s stolen my brand! How Russian trademark warehousers hijacked Starbucks, Amway, Kodak, Subway of their trademarks
• Leo Stoller’s Russian follower captures foreign trademarks and offers them back to their rightful owners – for $600,000
  
• Starbucks lost the right to the brand after a Moscow lawyer who specializes in claiming unused trademarks succeeded in winning the rights to it
  
• In Russia, Starbucks has taken squatter Sergei Zujkov to court for holding the rights to the Russian trademark for Starbucks LLC.
  
• Lexmark trademark case: now they’re convinced they should have registered trademark in Russia
  

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The Federal Customs Service is completing conciliation of amendments to the Customs Code, according to which any goods registered with the Russian Agency for Patents and Trademarks (Rospatent) and suspected of being of pirate production can be held for verification for ten days before being cleared through customs. Similar laws are in effect in the European Union. Now, the customs service only handles goods in that manner if their brand name is registered in its own commercial register.
That customs service database was begun in 1997and contains about 700 trademarks. They are trademarks of Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Martini Bacardi, Gillette, Nestle, Adidas, Nike, Lee, Wrangler, L’Oreal, and the Red October, Rot Front and Babaevsky candy makers.

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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