Telegram messenger won the intermediate round in the fight for the Gram brand. The court temporarily recognized the right of the Telegram founder to the name of the cryptocurrency.
The Gram brand became a stumbling block for the two companies in May of this year. The Russian entrepreneur’s company, as well as the American startup Lantah LLC, began developing a cryptocurrency under the same name. The messenger defended the brand he advertised and filed a lawsuit in the San Francisco District Court. Yesterday, during the trial, an interim court decision was made. In American practice, a temporary injunction on the use of a trademark is used to prevent damage from its illegal use by one of the parties. As practice shows, the final court decision rarely does not correspond to the intermediate one. According to this court decision, Telegram received legal rights to the Gram trademark.
Pavel Durov celebrates his victory and is confident that the final decision in the patent war will be in his favor. No wonder he attracted one of the most highly paid and professional lawyers, John Neukom, who specializes in property rights. Knowledge of the nuances of American legislation provided the lawyer with a confident position. In the United States, rights to a trademark are determined by its commercial use, which is considered a priority argument in disputes than state registration of a trademark.
Durov presented irrefutable evidence of using the name Gram for commercial purposes earlier than the startup Lantah. Telegram Group held two rounds of fundraising for the Telegram Open Network (TON), which is being developed, which plans to use Gram tokens for internal payments.
Past rounds of investment in TON, attracted $1.5 billion in investments for the Gram commercial solution. For the court, this became the decisive argument. While the startup Lantah was just going to receive $5 million from investors under the brand, it never began commercial activities using the name, but only filed an application for registration of rights with the US Patent Office on February 25.
The declaration of a patent war on Durov did not help Daniel Jeffrey, the founder of Lantah. At the moment, the court has not accepted all submitted applications for trademark registration in different countries as a convincing argument for making a decision in its favor...
There have been no official comments from representatives of the startup Lantah LLC regarding the loss of the intermediate stage of the trial.
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