Chinese Car Wars

Carmaker Land Rover (which India's Tata acquired from Ford) is suing Chinese carmaker Geely of Hangzhou (which acquired Volvo from Ford) for registering its Chinese characters "Lu Hu" in China. Land Rover says it used the characters for its "Land Rover" brand since the early 1990s. In 1999 Geely registered the "Lu Hu" trademark knowing that Land Rover was using it. Having lost at TRAB the case is now being appealed to the Beijing No 1 Intermediate court.

Meanwhile BMW (which sold Land Rover to Ford) has its own (dis)similar problems. Wenzhou Baoma Electric sought to register BMW's Chinese characters in its class 9 mark on electrical switches. After failing to prove that the marks could be confused by consumers, given the different goods, BMW has also appealed from TRAB to the Beijing No 1 Intermediate court.

The challenges illustrated by these cases include the difficulties of planning Chinese character brands. Secondly the slow pace of TRAB cases can leave disputes unresolved for many years. As in BMW's case the ongoing problem of proving reputation/fame challenges many IP holders, and this is of course even harder across classes.

Guest post by IP Komodo Dragon

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Is It a Plane? Is It a Bird? No It is the Bleagle! Made in China

Stan Abrams of the China Hearsay (which has been totally upgraded) reports straing from the INTA in Boston about ... Geely's Gleagle. Mr Abrams is giving his always entertaining thoughts about trademarks that consist of made-up words.

Read more here.

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IPR Challenges in Geely-Ford Talks About Volvo

Keith Naughton and Cathy Chan wrote about the effort of Geely to buy Volvo of Ford jeopardized because of intellectual property rights related challenges, read the Reuters article here.

The struggle about IPRs comes in the wake of "the FBI’s Oct. 14 arrest of former Ford engineer Xiang Dong Yu, 47, who was charged with stealing trade secrets from Ford in an effort to get a job with a Chinese car company."

Xiang Dong Yu, worked at Ford from 1997 to 2007, according to the U.S. Justice Department and "is is charged with stealing more than 4,000 Ford documents and using them to seek employment with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., according to the U.S. indictment. He eventually was hired by Beijing Automotive Corp. in China, according to the indictment."

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Is There Anything Original To A Geely GE? And What About Huatai?

At the 2009 Shanghai Auto Show the Chinese Geely GE gives its acte de présence. Richard S. Chang wrote: "By all accounts the limo is a shameless (if not slightly shorter in length) knock-off of the Rolls-Royce Phantom." Read Chang's blog for the NYT here.

Surprisingly, there is one thing that is original, but for that you need to go inside: there is only one backseat, according to Jalopnik, see and read here.

UPDATE: Michael Harley writes for Autoblog about Chinese Automaker Huatai that is reportedly readying a knockoff version of Bentley Continental, read here. 

Last year Matt Hardigree wrote for Jalopnik about Huatai's "most suetastic logo ever," see here.

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