A client of «A.Zalesov & Partners» Patent & Law Firm filed a lawsuit with the Moscow Region Arbitration Court requesting that the defendant is forced to stop selling the food supplement «ЦИМИЦИКЛИМ» (TSIMITSIKLIM) as infringing the trademark «ЦИ-КЛИМ» (TSI-KLIM) (RU510846) and to publish the court's decision. Doubts in confusing similarity were raised by the fact, that both names are the derivatives from the word «Cycle» (TSIKL) in the Russian language; meanwhile the original and infringing food supplements are providing modulating activity over women in the menopause.
The Court of First Instance and the Court of Appeal agreed with arguments raised by Plaintiff's representatives. In particular, both courts upheld the Plaintiff's arguments that the designation under dispute was confusingly similar to the aforementioned trademark. The court confirmed that the designations compared are similar to each other phonetically and graphically. The courts also pointed out that food supplement «ЦИМИЦИКЛИМ» (TSIMITSIKLIM) and «ЦИ-КЛИМ» (TSI-KLIM) (RU510846) provides similar biological activity and relate to the same price bracket so that consumers would likely associate the designations with each other despite the fact that their names differ semantically.
The court agreed with the Plaintiff's representatives that expert opinion provided by the Defendant does not prove the absence of the designations' similarity. The courts upheld the Plaintiff's argument that said expert opinion was based on non-applicable rules, and and that the opinion ignored the phonetic and graphic similarity of the designations compared. The client was represented before the court by Aleksey Zalesov, the managing partner, and Vlad Ryabov, a senior associate of «A.Zalesov & Partners» Patent & Law Firm.