From October 16th to 19th, 2015, “China Trademark Festival 2015” was held in Haikou, Hainan Province. During the Festival, the China Trademark Association launched the appraisal of Outstanding Trademark Cases 2014-2015. Two cases represented by CCPIT Patent and Trademark Law Office were included and published at the Forum on the Analysis of Typical Trademark Cases.
The appraisal was launched to review the great events in trademark area from 2014 to 2015, setting the outstanding cases as criteria for the future. The experts from courts, colleges and trademark administrative agencies had taken six standards, namely, innovativeness, effectiveness, typicality, impact, demonstrativeness and reference value into the appraisal.
The retrial case made by the Supreme People’s Court concerning the invalidation against trademark “Golden Fleece Logo” made it possible for the registration of the trademark on core products of Brooks Brothers company in China and exempted the company from substantive infringement compensation. It is the first time for the Supreme People’s Court to identify “the interested party” that has the right to file an administrative suit to the court and has made a guidance for the “application of foreign laws”.
In the MAYER • BOCHMB trademark objection review case, the applicant submitted not only the documents verifying its business relation with the opponent but also the evidence for prior use, which are completely in conformity with the applicable conditions stipulated in Article 15(2) of the Trademark Law, thus is a typical case against cybersquatting.
Article 15(2) of the new Trademark Law has stipulated those behaviors that violate the doctrine of good faith, such as cybersquatting of a trademark by taking advantage of special relations with the real trademark owner, including contract relation, business relation and so on, offering a powerful legal weapon to safeguard the owner's prior right of use. It’s noteworthy that compared with the previous Trademark Law, Article 15(2) of the new Trademark Law has extended the relation between the two parties and clarified the conditions for a prior use.
