Trademark Squatter

Ahh...the Times of Chandigarh - a proverbial gold mine for my blog. Read a story about a guy named Sergei Zuykov from Russia. This car alarm salesman turned trademark squatter (now there's a career move you can write home about), owns the rights to the Starbucks name in Russia. In fact, he claims to own 300 other well-known international trademarks.

According to the report, Starbucks originally trademarked its name in Russia in 1997 with plans to move into the world's largest country. However, plans for entry were put on hold during the economic collapse. That's when Sergei came along and appealed to the Russian trademark commission that, because Starbucks was not using the name commercially, the trademark should be open for registration.

What this has done is opened up the market for local and international companies to thrive. Sergei has essentially barred Starbucks from entering the market, while at the same time asking $600,000 US in exchange for the name. Starbucks is hesitant to pay because it doesn't want to encourage this sort of thing from happening.

$600,000 doesn't seem like a lot of money. I was expecting to see seven- or eight-figures. I bet most of you out there love Starbucks, but I can tell you that I think Sergei is doing a great service to Russia - local companies can now actually compete in the fairly large market. Nonetheless, the ruling will create huge precedents in Russia's battle with intellectual property rights (a problem that needs to be rectified for Russia to gain acceptance into the WTO).