PTC FORUM: DIGESTS OF ARTICLES

RUSSIA / TRADE MARKS, GEOGRAPHICAL INDICATIONS / REGISTRATION

The Battle for Bud

Managing Intellectual Property, No 112, September 2001

Frank Hellwig

This brief article, by the Head of Intellectual Property at Anheuser-Busch, has two points of special interest. The first is the author's experience of the ultimate fairness of the Russian trade mark registration process, through Rospatent. The second is his account of the arguments, based on geographical considerations, put forward in opposition to registration. The trade mark for which registration was sought was Budweiser (USA). Registration was opposed by the owners from the Czech Republic of the trade mark Budweiser Budvar, who claimed that the mark was also a geographical indication. At first, the Russian authorities were inclined to uphold the opposition; but Anheuser-Busch contested the grounds for opposition, saying that there was in fact no place-name with which the Czech beer could be closely related. This argument sufficed. In the author's opinion, it could also have been argued that beer was not in any event a type of product normally associated with a specific geographical location for production; and that it was an inappropriate product for protection under the accepted rules on geographical indications. However this may be, the Russian authorities relented and allowed the registration. Two further points of interest are mentioned by the author. One was the fact that the registration was made in Cyrillic, which raises an important and wider question of multilingual registration, with all its attendant problems of translation, transliteration, homophones and so on, for the purposes of global trade. The other was the fact that there are still areas of the world in which the official recognition of ownership of the Budweiser trade mark has yet to be resolved. [20060]