Dodgy trademark applications

This post was written by Michael Rank, who works for Trade Marks Directory Service (TMDS) which examines newly published trademark applications from across the globe on behalf of many famous global brands. You can contact them on info@tmds.com.

People seem to be designer name crazy these days, so it comes as no surprise that a canny Chinese businesswoman has tried to appropriate the name Manolo Blahnik for herself. True, the applicant from the export boom town of Wenzhou has tried to cover her tracks by changing the name of the revered Canary Islands-born shoe designer to "Molno blahnik". The application is to register her line of clothing in the Chinese trademarks journal. Nice try, but…

Gucci has diversified its products! From luxury fashion items, the famous Italian designer has switched to Christmas tree and miners’ lights…or has it?

A Shenzhen company has applied to register trademark Gucci for its glamorous line of lighting equipment.

The Chinese seem to have an enormous appetite for Hollywood blockbusters these days and American movie stars are becoming as famous in China as they are in the rest of the world. Little surprise, then, that a number of Chinese entrepreneurs have got on the Hollywood bandwagon. Catherine Zeta-Jones is one such victim, with a businessman in a far-flung part of Shandong province applying to register ZetaJones in English and Chinese as the trademark for his own line of perfumes, cosmetics, deodorants, etc.

A crafty businessman in eastern China has tried to bag the trademark Yahoo! in Chinese for his own products ranging from fax machines to lifejackets.

The entrepreneur, in the export city of Ningbo, applied to register the mark Ya Hu - which means "elegant tiger" in Chinese - in the Chinese trademark journal, even though these are the very same characters used by Yahoo! Inc on their Chinese-language websites for search engines and other Internet tools.