But we do care about the site and from time to time update it – we do update current fees, and do update certain pages once range of our services shifts somewhere. For instance, recently two pages were quite radically edited – in pursuet of more clear message and such. These are:
Page “Trademark registration services in Russia”

and

Page devoted to Document delivery service – now it says “Document delivery vendor, source for Russian, European, Turkish etc articles”.

As I’ve just mentioned in Facebook, I’d better set up a page that is not named “Russian document retrieval servic…e” – we went well beyond Russia centered services and got heavily occipied with other countries – say, more than 2/3 of all delivered articles, thesises, dissertations and conference proceedings were for Eastern European (like Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Croatian, Serbian etc.) and Turkish ones.

Related posts:

• Refreshed our Wall of Trademarks filed in Russia
• Facts, stats and thoughts on our document delivery service
• Some of trademark applications we’ve filed in Russia recently
• Russian patent service says YES to trademarking (RU2007719479)
• (Updated) quick guide to trademark registration in Russia in 2009

In the light of the above, an article in The Economist was fun to read.

As Carl Oppedahl of e-trademarks-l nicely summarized it:

“DESIGNERS of fancy apparel would like their customers to believe that wearing their creations lends an air of wealth, sophistication and high status. And it does—but not, perhaps, for the reason those designers might like to believe, namely their inherent creative genius. A new piece of research confirms what many, not least in the marketing departments of fashion houses, will long have suspected: that it is not the design itself that counts, but the label.”

I couldn’t say it better in English.

BTW, guys at The Economist produce absolutely fascinating wall calendars – check them out! I got mine in the post couple of weeks ago and it keeps me amused ever since – so much fun to study all those tiny details, it’s always sets me in positive mood

See also:

I saw quite nice example of such a classified patent today while visiting with my 7 yrs old kid Mikhail Kalashnikov’s museum in the city of Izhevsk, Russia. Kalashnikov got a classified patent for submachine gun – actually, that was just a prototype of AK-47, or even prototype of some vital parts later used in the design.

See also:

——

We’re preparing response to provisional refusal issued by the Russian Patent office under the Madrid agreement concerning international registration – it must be done in English and I got stuck with proper wording (haven’t done that before). I tried to find an example of such a letter but failed.

Could anybody help?

Here is a draft translation made by Google Translate:

–
With regard to the international registration ?*****
Name of applicant: ****
Address for correspondence: ******

We suggest removing the word element «ABCD» of legal protection and specify it as unprotected element of the trademark.
–

Please submit your variants via comments.

Thanks in advance!

See also:

Related posts:

• Russian patent service says YES to trademarking (RU2007719479)
• New “trademark registration in Russia” and “Document delivery service” pages
• Some of trademark applications we’ve filed in Russia recently
• (Updated) quick guide to trademark registration in Russia in 2009
• Should we have trademark filed before we start spending on marketing material?

Our client wrote:

Q: I have prepared an Intellectual Property Licence Agreement for my client from UK. It is proposed that a licence will be granted to a Russian company which will be for a business venture in Socci. The Agreement is in English. The Licensee will probably get legal advice in Russia and issues relating to Russian law may arise.. And I don’t know whether a translation of the Agreement will be required.

Do you do work of this nature?

A: Yes, we can do it. First, the Agreement can be signed not sooner than after the date of the registration – this is not available yet (but should be soon). Second, it does require to be translated in to Russian – we’ll have to submit three copies of the executed bilingual agreement to Rospatent, and pay fees.

Q: Is registration a prerequisite to achieving enforceability of the IP licence in Russia?

A: Yes.

Q: With regard to the translation, what happens if there is a discrepancy between the two versions? Can we include a provision which says that the English language version will prevail in the event of any inconsistency between the two versions?

A: You can do that, I think it will not prevent registration of the agreement in Rospatent, but as in the case of judicial
trial what court will decide, I do not know.

Q: Can we choose the jurisdiction and the applicable law?

A: Russian trademark will be only valid on the territory of the Russian Federation. What might be other jurisdictions? Legal relations connected with the Russian trademark will be governed by Russian legislation.

See also:

During last year I’d been trying to collect document delivery requests data into a Excel file, and while I had some spare time during the holidays I analyzed collected data and revealed interesting facts I’m going to publish:

Total number of document delivery requests: 103
Requests for Russian articles: 34
Requests for non-Russian articles: 69 (that’s TWICE as much as compared with Russian articles, hmm…)
Average number of requests for document delivery: 9 per month
(BUT in December only we received 27 requests)

Top 3 foreign (that is non-Russian) articles requests:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech

Full list of foreign (that is non-Russian) articles delivery requests we fulfilled in 2009:
18 Poland
10 Romania
8 Czech
5 Croatia
4 Greece
3 Bulgaria
3 Serbia
3 Turkey
2 Slovakia
2 Ukraine
1 Armenia
1 Azerbajzhan
1 Belarus
1 Georgia
1 Germany
1 Hungary
1 Italia
1 Lithuania
1 Slovenia
1 Uzbekistan

Quite often we have to deal with insufficient data in citations. Here is few examples I’d like to share with you:

1. My patron wrote:
“I can’t locate the publication name so I am unable to determine the publication location. Is this something that you may be able to obtain?”
The publication in question was “Byul. Izobret. i Tovarnykh Znakov”. For me it was immediately clear that it’s in fact Official Gazette of the Russian patent office (“Byulleten’ Izobretenii i Tovarnykh Znakov” in full). So apparently it was a patent my patron was after – but it’s number was not available. Luckily, I knew year and title – so I could search the document in Russian patent database and locate few patents matching the criteria, and one of them was the necessary one.

2. My patron requested an article from journal titled “Chirurgia (Bucuresti)“. There were given all usual details – author, title, year, journal’s issue, pages – and previously I successfully delivered few articles from this very journal, so I went to check the necessary issue of the journal. But to my surprise, there was no such article published in this issue. I proceeded with search throughout entire archive of the journal – to no avail, such an article (and I tried concatenated title as well) was not found. I tried then to look it up by author – same result, search brought no matches. Hmm…so I had to do a bibliography search of my own, and it turned out that the citation was incorrect – the journal was not Romanian one (Chirurgia (Bucuresti), but instead it was an Italian journal with similar name:

CHIRURGIA
A Journal on Surgery
P.ISSN 0394-9508

Having found the correct citation, I was able to deliver requested article.

3. My patron asked to obtain a copy of an article published in a Russian newspaper. Data was sufficient – date, title, newspaper’s name, etc. – and even online archive of that Russian newspaper was available for search at the newspaper’s site. Strangely, requested article could not be found by search in the archive …In the end, I was able to retrieve full text of the article from a cache elsewhere – apparently, requested article was for some reason deleted from the newspaper’s archive – but once published on the Net information does not disappear tracelessly , so we, infopros, can sometimes resurrect wiped bits of data

I love this kind of document detective work, so feel free to contact us with any – regular or mysterious – document delivery requests, be that for Russian literature or non-Russian documents, we’ll give it our best try.

–
Source: Russian patents blog

Related posts:

• New “trademark registration in Russia” and “Document delivery service” pages

Some time ago there was a topic at INTA mailing list regarding Russian domains and tradmark filing – the topic was started by yours truly, so I’d like to share with you that I’ve gathered in the discussion.

My question was as following:

We file trademark applications in Russia on behalf of foreign companies,
and it occurred to me that it might be wise to register a domain in Russia simultaneously – to guard the mark being filed against trademark crooks.

Do you think it makes sense to register domains along with regular trademark registration?

Answers:

Yes, of course. And more importantly, if the domain name is not available then you might consider finding a new name to trademark.

We always make sure the domain is available and purchase it before we file for the trademark, just to make sure your scenario below doesn’t arise. You can always drop the domain later if you end up not using it.

When my clients apply to register trademarks, I always suggest that they may wish to register the TRADEMARK.com, TRADEMARK.co.uk, TRADEMARK.ru etc. domain name of countries where they will do business, or anticipate doing business. As you know, in most countries the cost of domain name registration is paltry compared to the cost of wrestling the domain away from a cybersquatter.

In that situation, I’d definitely say it would be a good idea to register
the DNs. They are probably very cheap, compared with trade marks.

In my opinion, that is an excellent idea if someone intends to conduct
business in Russia and needs the domain names.

And today I heard this bit of news:

Icann’s launch of domain names in non-Latin alphabets was applauded by bloggers this week. On Class 46, Sasha Yelnick provides some guidance to how the rules will work in Russia, where registration of new domains will start on November 16 and will be phased in gradually before being open to everyone in March next year.

Russian domains WHOIS (in English)

You can purchase necessary Russian domains directly at RU Center.

See also:

Since August we received only one inquiry for free search in Russian trademarks (as compared to tens of inquiries for regular Russian trademark search) – and results of the free search only cemented my opinion that free trademark search in Russia being total and complete waste of time and totally misleading.

Here is the story – rather short, and structured in the table for your convinience.

So, effectively, a $150 search saved out client US$735 in filing fees – cause if they’d file just based on the results of the free search, Russian Patent and Trademark Office would turn the application down due to the fact that confusingly similar application was already filed.

But that’s not all – now, the most intriguing part of the story…I wondered what company happened to file an application for exactly the same word in exactly the same class? I googled the company’s name (say, THECOMPANY LLC) up and found out that domain in the email address my client sent the inquiry from had been registered in the name of…THECOMPANY LLC.

Anyways, as my client mentioned in his followup email, all’s well that ends well.

–
Source: Russian patents blog

• (Updated) quick guide to trademark registration in Russia in 2009
• Some facts about Russian trademark search services
• Some of trademark applications we’ve filed in Russia recently
• Russian patent service says YES to trademarking (RU2007719479)
• Report: Foreign Trade Mark Registrations in Russia by Country and Companies for Two Months of 2008

Today’s location is Lower Hutt, in New Zealand.

I got to know about it via a patent attorney from NZ who contacted us on regard of trademark registration in Russia – and, coincidentally, a free-lance editor who sometimes helps us with an English translations of Russian patents happens to live there, too.

What a lovely place to live in…

Photo’s source

It also features on the Wikipedia article for Lower Hutt.
(photo’s source)

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• Things I enjoy most about being an infopro
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• Izhevsk city view