Unfair Competition: a Remark on Trademarks

Patents and trademarks go hand in hand. To clarify, both deal with setting ownership to novelty that a person creates, but how such ownership is exercised and the degree to which the rights of those owners are given drastically differ. Specifically, take, for example, the duration of trademarks versus patents; trademarks are distinguished into two categories: a trademark is either registered or unregistered. With this, regarding the separate classifications of registered versus unregistered, the duration of a trademark exists in perpetuity, while patent protection only lasts 20 years at the point of patent issuance. Now then, trademarks and patents deal with the intellectual property arena. There is a reason why such a dichotomy between trademarks and patents is so distinguished.??

Here, the reason for the differences in validity between trademarks and patents is that trademarks are legitimized through the given brand's usage within the marketplace. In contrast, patents, after issuance, do not have to be used per se to preserve their intellectual property legitimacy. To be brief, utilizing a given brand is fundamental for maintaining its trademarked status because trademarks deal with the application of social equity. In a sense, the meaning of social equity is that through a brand (e.g., a logo), consumers can limit their needed time for searching for such a brand due to legal enforcement of maintaining that brand's novelty by providing companies the ability to litigate those who attempt to copy their brand to gain public trust to buy their knock-off products. Therefore, since the dawn of the digital age and the tidal waves of data for which consumers are bombarded, the ability to distinguish brands from associative competitors within the domestic and international space has become fundamental to companies' continued existence within the capital markets for which they compete.??

The development of trademark law, a relatively young field compared to others in the legal space, is closely tied to economic theory. The Chicago School of Economics, with its influence on trademark law's development and nurturing, plays a significant role. This influence is vividly demonstrated in the case of Corp v. Euroquilt, Inc., 772 F.2d 1423 (7th Cir. 1985), where Judge Easterbrook, a leader of the Chicago School, applied economic logic to the legal judgment, thereby shaping the trajectory of trademark law and earning respect for his influential role.?

Trademarks help consumers to select goods. By identifying the source of the goods, they convey valuable information to consumers at lower costs. Easily identified trademarks reduce the costs consumers incur in searching for what they desire, and the lower the costs of search the more competitive the market. A trademark also may induce the supplier of goods to make higher quality products and to adhere to a consistent level of quality - Judge Easterbrook.

With this, the issue of the influence of trademarks concerning the economic dynamics of profits to be made is fundamental to a company thriving within capital domestic and international consumer markets. Bearing this in mind, we should now pivot our focus when legal entities do not enforce trademark protections; going back to reference the international scope of concern when it comes to trademark and patent protections, intellectual property piracy infects not only the music industry but every industry for which a given product of usefulness is developed, including pharmaceuticals. In this, we evaluate the intellectual property enforcement of Western products within present-day Russia. The Russian Federation (i.e., the present-day Russian political body) joined the World Trade Organization on August 22, 2012, after WTO membership requires implementing the doctrine of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (i.e., TRIPS). Since then, the Russian Federation has made numerous maneuvers to circumvent the enforcement of TRIPS. More in detail, the Russian Federation parlayed Article 15(4) of the constitution of the Russian Federation with Article 7(1) of the civil code to enforce the question of international treatise into Russia's larger legal body.?Afterward, in 2020, Russia amended its constitution to enforce domestic legal precedence over international treaties, thus bypassing the mandated adherence to TRIPS underlying membership of the WTO.??

Providing context to the prior assertion, on March 3, 2022, a Russian lower court based in Kirov made a judgment regarding the trademarks "Peppa Pig" and "Daddy Pig" trademarks. These given trademarks, owned by the British company Entertainment One?Ltd., this company sued litigation pursuant to damages caused by perceived trademark infringement committed by the Russian national Ivan Kozhevnikov of twenty-thousand rubles. Here, Judge Andrei Slavinsky dismissed the case explicitly based on American and British economic sanctions against the Russian Federation. Considering this, according to the Russian legal code, such a judgment is legally sound. Therein, only a few days after Judge Slavinsky issued such a judgment against Entertainment One Ltd. (i.e., on March 6, 2022), in favor of defendant Ivan Kozhevnikov, the Russian Federation issued Decree No. 299; this decree allows the Russian Federation to perform intellectual property infringement where such IP was inseminated by specific foreign nations (i.e., Russian Federation infringement on foreign patents and trademarks) by setting the restitution for economic damages incurred by that given foreign nation for which the Russian Federation infringed upon, to 0% monetary restitution to the infringed party.?

?