Monthly Archives: September 2016

Volkswagen Car Logo

RUPTO (Rospatent) refused an appeal by Volkswagen against registration of a Chinese company’s brand

The Russian Patent and Trademark Office (Rospatent) has refused an appeal filed by Volkswagen against a registration of ‘Raeton’ trademark by a Chinese company in Russia.

The ‘Raeton’ trademark is owned by a Chinese automobile manufacturer Chongqing Changan Automobile Co., Ltd and registered under the 12th Nice class (vehicles) in Russia. During the hearings Volkswagen stated that the trademark in question is deceptively similar to its own ‘Phaeton’ trademark and thus should be excluded from the Russian trademark register.

In turn, the Chinese company claimed that their trademark is clearly distinctive and causes no trademark infringement. The Chinese company also stated that goods sold under the two trademarks are technically complex products and usually purchased after careful consideration due to their high cost.

The Russian Patent and Trademark Office has ruled that the two trademarks are not deceptively similar due to significant phonetical, semantical and graphical distinctness.

Russian Patent Landscapes

RUPTO (Rospatent): ‘Patent analytics is a must for the economy of tomorrow’

Patent analytics is an important tool for boosting innovative business and helps to unveil perspective development trends in various economy sectors, said the RUPTO‘s head Grigory Ivliev while introducing a new Patent Landscapes project to the press on Friday.

Ivliev noted that patent landscapes is a unique project of the Russian Patent and Trademark Office based on a large analytical research of existing Russian prior art and scientific literature. Patent landscapes are a complex tool allowing to assess competitive abilities of perspective technologies and develop their global market promotion strategies.

Advantages of the RUPTO’s patent landscapes, said Ivliev, are due to a deep analysis of patent documents relating not only to the subject itself, but also to various separate aspects of the patent procedure. Particularly, they include specific manufacturing methods, industrial uses, design of technical equipment, etc. The analysis is carried out by a department consisting of sectoral experts, including those from the respective institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

‘The launch of the Patent Landscapes project is one of the measures proposed by the Russian Patent and Trademark Office, which are intended to bring changes and maximize the use of the scientific, technical, and human capital of our country’, said the RUPTO’s head.

Oleg Ena, the head of the RUPTO’s project office, has added that Patent Landscapes project is based on unique information assets of the Office, containing full collections of Russian and USSR patents, as well as documents from the Eurasian Patent Office.

‘Patent landscapes will be of great help for major Russian companies, local innovative development clusters, intellectual property strategists and Russian patent attorneys‘, he concluded.