Dell Inc. vs. Dellenglish International

In December 2006, the Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court made the first instance judgment on the trademark infringement case in which Dell Inc. (Dell) sued Dellenglish International (DEI), a local English training school, and its organizer, the Beijing Intercontinental Culture & Art Exchange Co., Ltd. (Intercontinental).

The court ruled that the representation "DELL" used by DEI in its business activities has infringed the exclusive right owned by Dell's registered trademark "Dell" in class 41. The court also ruled that DEI and its organizer should stop using "DELL" in its business activities, make public statement to eliminate the adverse effects and compensate RMB 200,000 yuan (US$25,000) to Dell (wherein Intercontinental is responsible for RMB 80,000 yuan (US$10,000 of the total compensation).

The plaintiff Dell claimed that DEI used representations such as "","", "Dell English" and "Dell International English" widely in its business activities. "" is the Chinese translation of "Dell". In addition, Intercontinental registered the domain name "dellenglish.com" for its online business. Dell also claimed that on the websites used by DEI and Intercontinental, advertisement slogans such as "Dellenglish was born in USA and is famous in China", "Dellenglish International School", "Dellenglish is an International Brand", "Dellenglish American Academy" were misleading. In conclusion, Dell stated that the two defendants infringed the exclusive right of its registered trademark and its corporate name. Thus, the activities conducted by the two defendants constituted false publicity.

In response, DEI and Intercontinental alleged that when they started to use the associated mark of "", "DELL ENGLISH" and the figure of dragon and eagle, Dell's registered trademark did not have the market awareness and the commercial reputation in China. Therefore, they did not have bad faith in connection with unfair competition. According to the two defendants, they started to use the associated trademark at the beginning of 2001 and filed trademark registration application in August 2001 which was publicized by Chinese Trademark Office after preliminary examination.

The court held that as a company established in the US, Dell Inc. is the corporate name and "" is only a part of its Chinese translation. Therefore, DEI has the right to use "" as its school name which has been approved by the relevant administrative authority and such use does not infringe Dell's right of corporate name. In addition, the use of "" by DEI is not a false use and therefore there is no false publicity involved in DEI's business activities. The court also found that when DEI applied to the relevant administrative authority for using "" as the school name, Dell's registered trademark was not a well-known trademark in China. In this sense, the organizer of DEI did not have bad faith when it applied ""as the school name, which is not in class of computer products. The court held that DEI is entitled to use "" in its business activities and its school name, which does not infringe Dell's registered trademark.