The Chamber for Patent Disputes ruled in favor of our client to keep in force the legal protection of the international registration «KRUPNIK» for goods in Class 33. The party that has filed an invalidation action — Belarus company «Vinokurnya Naroch» — had been claiming that krupnik is a kind of a product, namely liqueur (traditional herbal and honey liqueur in Poland, Belarus and Lithuania). The Civil Code prohibits registering words that simply name the product as a trademark since all the manufacturers of such produсts should be able to use such names on their products. The plaintiff tried to prove that Russian consumers while facing the word «krupnik» on the bottle would understand that this is a certain herbal and honey liqueur that could be produced by any manufacturer (such as «milk» on milk packaging). In support of their arguments, the party referred to the use of the word in a novel by Henryk Senkevich «Pan Volodyevsky». However, it turned out that in Russian publications the word «krupnik» is usually translated as «honey» or «punch» rather than «krupnik» which proves that Russian readers do not associate this word with a drink at all and it cannot give any idea of the properties of the drink.
Therefore, although in some Polish-Russian vocabularies the truly outdated word «krupnik» is translated into Russian as «krupnik» the Chamber has agreed that this is not enough to consider the word just a name of the product and to cancel the protection of the trademark.