Teflon wins Cyrillic defence

It is hard to imagine that anyone would attempt to cancel the Teflon trade mark in Cyrillic (TEOJIOH) as not being used on the Russian market. But someone did. This was Pilot Ltd, a large Russian trading company. It was selling kitchenware and filed a cancellation action against the trade mark TEOJIOH (registration number 140510) with the Russian Chamber of Patent Disputes.

Pilot argued that the use of the Teflon mark in Latin characters does not prove the use of TEOJIOH in Russian characters and insisted that the trade mark TEOJIOH should be cancelled in Class 21, for kitchenware. It is common knowledge that TEOJIOH was registered in the name of EI DuPont de Nemours from Delaware, US.

The trade mark owner explained that its products were labeled with the trade mark Teflon in Latin characters because for branding and as a multinational company, sales to other countries require a consistent trade mark. As for the controversial trade mark TEOJIOH, it represents transliteration of the trade mark Teflon and is not used in Russia on the goods in order to avoid discrepancies on the product labels consistent with global use; but it is actively used in catalogues and advertisements for local use in Russia. This kind of use is closely related to the placement of the goods on the market which speaks in favour of the due use of the mark on the market.

The outcome was that the trade mark stood. The case did not present much difficulty for the Patent Office or DuPont, the curious circumstance being that the attacker did not understand that he was beating his head against a brick wall.