Sector: Retail

The Chinese celebration of Singles Day each November 11 has become one of the world’s largest shopping events – and has arguably turned into the most important day in the calendar for many of the world’s top brand owners. But as e-commerce giant Alibaba reports record Singles Day turnover for 2016, as well as greater-than-ever buy-in from foreign brands, the true extent of trademark infringement and counterfeit trade taking place during the event remains to be seen.

14 November 2016

One of South Africa’s most successful and established online retailers, Yuppiechef, recently failed in the Supreme Court of Appeal to establish trademark infringement or passing off against a rival online retailer based on its trademark YUPPIECHEF.

10 November 2016

The Federal Court recently granted an interlocutory injunction to the owner of the LITTLE GREEK TAVERNA trademark, restraining use of the deceptively similar LITTLE GREEK CUZINA trademark on the basis that knowledge of the earlier business would cause consumers to wonder whether the two were connected.

09 November 2016

Next week Alibaba is to place virtual reality (VR) technology at the centre of its Singles Day sales drive, the latest in a series of high-profile uses of the technology in China. With the country’s VR industry predicted to be worth Rmb55 billion ($8.14 billion) by 2020, it makes the market one to monitor for counsel concerned over how brands may be used (for good and bad) in the virtual environment.

03 November 2016

New research reveals that, after a decline across the previous two quarters, in Q3 2016 the number of third-party advertisers bidding on trademark terms on Google jumped 32%. Across the search engine landscape, such bidding resulted in 2.5 billion impressions – and 38 million clicks – being lost by brands.

19 October 2016

Submissions to the Office of the US Trade Representative’s (USTR) annual request for comments to identify the online and physical markets that should be included in the 2016 Notorious Markets List has seen renewed calls for Alibaba to be relisted. However, the online giant has confirmed the filing of a rebuttal comment, telling <i>World Trademark Review</i> that its submission describes its steadfast efforts to fight counterfeiters online.

10 October 2016

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has held in <i>Trader Joe’s Company v Hallatt</i> that the extraterritorial reach of the Lanham Act is a question of the claim’s merits rather than a question of the court’s subject-matter jurisdiction.

05 October 2016

This week the ‘.shop’ gTLD hit general availability, with the registry behind the string revealing that it registered almost 40,000 domains in the first 30 minutes of sales. Watchers of the expanded online space – particularly trademark owners seeking to gauge the need for defensive registrations – have been awaiting the launch of strings that go truly mainstream. So is the early performance of ‘.shop’ a sign that the blockbusters are now arriving?

28 September 2016

In <i>Future Enterprises Pte Ltd v EU Intellectual Property Office</i>, the EU General Court held that McDonald’s reputation makes it possible to have exclusive rights to the use and registration of trademarks that contain the prefix ‘Mac’ or ‘Mc’ for food and beverages.

13 September 2016

A coalition of international brand and trade groups has sent a letter to senior figures at Alibaba Group highlighting continued concerns around the implementation of effective anti-counterfeiting measures on its platforms. While the letter includes scathing criticisms of some of the currently available tools – decrying the processing of non-good faith notices as “woeful” – it offers a number of practical recommendations on how the online giant could improve.

08 September 2016