trademark

On November 7th 2018 our managing counsel Daniel Albrecht delivered successfully a keynote speech about Trademark registration in Austria and Germany at the Guangdong Intellectual Property Trade Expo 2018 . We are happy that the audience of about 200 IP professionals and government officials from the Greater Bay Area were so interesting in this topic. Special thx to our friends from the IPR daily for the introduction to this great event.

Under the approval of Guangdong provincial committee and government, the first Guangdong Intellectual Property Trade Expo was hosted in Guangzhou...

Pinduoduo Inc. (拼多多) is a social e-commerce start-up based in Shanghai. Pinduoduo offers to shoppers discounts on bulk orders; in fact, shoppers are encouraged to form “teams” with their social networking connections on WeChat and QQ to score bigger discounts. Pinduoduo filed its Initial Public Offering on Nasdaq (American stock exchange) on July 26; the IPO offered 85.6 million American depository shares at US $19. The opening price was US $26.5 per American depository shares, up nearly 40% from the issued price. Its massive IPO ranked alongside other Chinese e-commerce giants such as...

In 2012, the two plaintiffs Mona Lisa Building Materials Co. Ltd. and Mona Lisa Sanitary Appliance Co. requested the cancellation of the registered trademark M MONALISA in Class 11 for “Flush Toilets owned by the Mona Lisa Group Co., Ltd. The plaintiffs based their claim on the prior registration of MONA LISA and Chinese characters in Class 11 for “Bath fittings, Sauna bath installations, Shower cubicles, etc.”. On November 25th, 2013, the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board (TRAB) decided in favour of the plaintiffs.

However, the Beijing First Intermediate People’s Court (IPC...

2014 Christian Dior registered its J’adore perfume bottle as a 3D trademark and also an international registered trademark . Following the Madrid Agreement and the Madrid Protocol, Dior applied a territorial extension protection in China through the international bureau of WIPO. The TRAB of the SAIC rejected the application on July 13, 2015 with the reason of lack on distinctiveness. Dior filed a application for review of the refusal, but was also rejected with the same reason. After that, Dior submitted a administrative case to the court against TRAB’s decision, but failed by...

The definition of an unfair competition is given by the article 2 of the PCR Anti-Unfair Competition Law（反不正当竞争法). According to this article, an act of unfair competition is constituted when during production or distribution activities, a business operator disrupts the market competition order or infringes the legal rights and interests of other business operators or consumers.

Some unfair competition acts can be related to intellectual property such as the Article 6 which concerns the copy and imitation of brands and the Article 9 relating to the trade secrets. These articles...

The Shanghai Intellectual Property Court concluded a trademark infringement lawsuit raised by the French wine manufacturer Chateau Lafite against Shanghai Mellowines Development Co Ltd and its parent company Shanghai Safe International Logistics.

Chateau Lafite Rothschild owns the English trademark Lafite in China since 1997, and filed a trademark application for the Chinese version of Lafite, a decade later. Its application was first rejected by the SAIC and in 2017, the trademark registration was finally approved.

In May 2015, Lafite found that Shanghai Mellowines sold...

Since 2014, sound marks are registrable as a trademark in China after the amendment of the Trademark Law of the People’s Republic of China. Thus, start or ending songs of programs or musical advertisements can seek a protection by the Trademark Law. However, until 2018, only 21 sound marks were allowed to be registered out of a total of about 500 sound marks application.

BMW AG applied for a sound mark registration including a piece of instrumental used in commercial activities and at the end of BMW commercials. First, its application was rejected on grounds of the lack of...

Lego Group sued two Chinese companies for manufacturing and selling products that were almost identical to ones from the Lego Friends range. The leading European toymaker claimed that the logo and the packaging used by the Chinese companies under the brand Bela constitute an infringement of the copyright in Lego Group’s logo and packaging.

The issue raised before the Court was whether products sold under the brand Bela infringe Lego’s copyrights, and in this direction, constitutes an act of unfair competition. On September 2017, the Shantou Intermediate People’s Court ruled in...

At September 8th 2017 the Shenyang local authorities hosted the first Shenyang-Germany Intellectual Property Seminar. The German-China Industrial Park of Shenyang has made a lot of effort to organize this event and get an interesting group of participants together. Starke Managing Counsel Daniel Albrecht gave a lesson about the differences between the Chinese and German trademark law. Thanks to all 60 participants and my co-speakers, special from the University of Shenyang, the Intelllectual Property Office and the Custom Service of Shenyang.

Counterfeiting products are not unusual in China. The key players of E-commerce in China are the Alibaba Group , which holds 70% of the total E-commerce market in China with Taobao and Tmall, and JD. com with a 20% market share. They step up taking various measures to crack down on counterfeit products, but the effect is quite limited. According to a survey published by State Administration for Industry and Commerce of China (SAIC) and China Consumers’ Association in 2015, there are 7 of 9 E-commerce platforms in the spot-check which sell counterfeit or substandard quality goods. However...