AVG Legal CEO Alexey Gavrishev says that the decision on this application "looks justified" because the Rospatent board based it on the fact that companies with the word Orion in their names had previously been registered in Russia. "Of course, only the lazy do not look for a political subtext now, but formally, the registration of one mark cannot infringe on other current copyright holders. But we cannot rule out the formality of refusal either," Gavrishev said. A c colombia cell phone number list omparative analysis of the Google Orion mark and contrasting it with the trademarks of other companies allowed Rospatent to conclude that the most significant element is "ORION/ОРИОН", while the phrase Google and Orion do not form a stable expression and are perceived separately, explains Rospatent's decision Kristina Vozhennikova, a lawyer in the intellectual property practice at the Intellectual Capital law firm.
Svetlana Butenko, a patent attorney at the Butenko and Partners agency, also believes that the decision was made "entirely in the spirit of Rospatent's methodology, according to which the inclusion of another's trademark or a similar designation in a trademark carries a high risk of confusion for the consumer." But she made the reservation that similarity does not always lead to confusion of trademarks and that Rospatent "often approaches the resolution of these issues formally."
Butenko and Vozhennikova noted that Google has three months to appeal the decision in the Court of Intellectual Property Rights. The defendant in this case will be the Chamber of Patent Disputes, a structural division of Rospatent. "I would like to believe that Rospatent refused to register this trademark without regard to the political situation in the country," Vozhennikova added. At the same time, Butenko suggested that the court would take into account the wide popularity of the word Google and its high distinctiveness. "In such disputes, sociological research is often used by applicants as a means of proving the absence of confusion," she concluded.
The largest domestic telecom operators do not use the Google Orion system, and their representatives did not assess the chances of this system appearing in Russia. MTS reported that such a system is not installed in their networks, adding that in places where the mobile signal penetrates poorly, subscribers can use the VoWiFi service (Voice over Wi-Fi is a technology that allows subscribers to make and receive voice calls, as well as send messages via Wi-Fi networks).
A MegaFon representative said that the company was not considering implementing Google Orion or similar systems. Instead, the company, he said, is "developing a high-speed mobile network and a federal VoWiFi network." A VimpelCom representative (operating under the Beeline brand) declined to comment. RBC sent a request to Rostelecom.