Brands are getting closer to the courts

The global companies remaining in Russia are looking for options to improve the effectiveness of protecting their brands. Thus, the local structure of Unilever received the rights to some brands in Russia, including Clean Line and Inmarko, which should ease possible legal disputes. Some market participants in Russia in recent years have become more active in imitating well-known brands and are trying to prematurely remove the legal protection of foreign trademarks, experts say.

Unilever Rus LLC, part of Unilever, in February-March 2024 became the copyright holder of several trademarks that previously belonged to foreign structures of the concern, follows from Rospatent data. These include the brands of cosmetics “Clean Line”, “Velvet Hands”, “Black Pearls”, dental products “Forest Balm”, ice cream “Inmarko”, Ekzo, etc. The previous copyright holders of the trademarks were the Dutch Unilever IP Holdings BV and the British Unilever Global IP.

Unilever Rus told Kommersant that the above-mentioned brands belong to Unilever headquarters, and Unilever Rus bought the rights to these trademarks registered in Russia in order to protect their use in the country. This will simplify risk management, for example, in the event of counterfeit detection, the company added.

Semenov & Pevzner partner Yulia Yarnykh says that when protecting trademarks, a local company does not require the legalization of foreign documents and, in general, the coordination of positions and decision-making are simplified. Just issuing a power of attorney for representation in court from a foreign company can take a lot of time, notes Alina Akinshina, CEO of Online Patent.

Forward Legal lawyer Lyudmila Lukyanova adds that in such disputes in court, arguments are often heard to remove protection from a trademark only because of the jurisdiction of the copyright holder. The Nestle Corporation, for example, transferred its trademarks to a local unit more than 20 years ago, says Olga Zinovieva, head of the Elekskor law firm. According to her, today such a transfer may also be caused by the desire to distance themselves as much as possible from direct connection with activities in Russia.

As Alina Akinshina notes, prompt response to potential violations for well-known brands of foreign origin has become more important in recent years. Some entrepreneurs have begun to more actively imitate well-known brands in the hope that some copyright holders have stopped monitoring violations in Russia, she points out. Yulia Yarnykh says that there are also risks of early termination of trademark protection due to claims due to non-use. As an example of one of the latest such disputes, the lawyer cites the lawsuit of the Lyubimy Krai confectionery association against the German Rewe Group for the early termination of legal protection of the Oliver’s brand. A preliminary hearing in this case has been postponed until September.

Rusbrand executive director Alexey Popovichev says that today the “patent trolls” of the early 2000s have been replaced by companies that track unused brands and try to revoke the protection of these brands for their own needs, but such cases remain isolated. According to him, attempts by individual market participants to obtain well-known brands have always been present and intensified for some time in 2022. But the state has shown that it continues to protect intellectual property, including international companies, the expert points out. Olga Zinovieva also says that already in 2023 the number of disputes about the protection of Western brands has decreased after an increase in 2022.

Anatoly Kostyrev