Google’s involvement in China has been lively in anybody’s language. It began with a lawsuit over a non-compete clause involving the new operation’s head, poached from Microsoft. Then came self-censorship to keep the Chinese government happy. Dropping the censored site this year was widely applauded, but led to a country-wide ban, and conducting a Google search in China is today only possible through Google.com.hk, the Hong Kong site.
And while all this was going on, Google was also having the rich experience, common to many foreign companies in China, of having to protect its trademarks. For once, it was the foreign company itself that was the defendant, at least at first, as Beijing Gu Ge Science & Technology Ltd claimed that Google China’s trademark, also pronounced ‘gu ge’, was a touch too similar for comfort.
The courts were unimpressed, perhaps in view of the fact that the Beijing company opened for business a week after Google China announced its trading name. Google sued back, and the affair ended badly for the Beijing firm, which was obliged to cough up compensation and cease and desist.
Beyond translation
The Google case is only one example of the intellectual property (IP) conundrums caused by the fact that, rather than simply using a different alphabet from that used by most international companies, which would be complicated enough, the Chinese don’t use an alphabet at all, creating a hazy grey zone of rough phonetic adaptation, ripe for IP plundering.
Size and global reach offer no protection, and some big international names have had to dive into the phonetic soup to protect themselves. The Zhongshan City Wo Er Ma Lamps Factory may have registered its company name and the domain name woerma.com, but the courts decided this was a clear infringement of the rights of the better-known Wal-Mart, which, when written in Chinese characters, is pronounced exactly the same way.
The directors of Sichuan Su Fu Bi no doubt thought they had hit on a neat little idea with their name, and registered a number of trademarks, including China Su Fu Bi Auction Group, before the better-known Sotheby’s filed successfully for protection of its transliterated moniker.
Starbucks faced a different challenge. Rather than being taken off by direct transliteration, the coffee chain ran up against the Shanghai Xingbake Coffee Shop Ltd, which looks harmless enough until you discover that xing means ‘star’, and that ba and ke form a phonetic version of ‘buck’. Fortunately, this example of the deft use of language by Chinese entrepreneurs still wasn’t good enough for the courts, which were also somehow not swayed by the managers’ insistence that they had never heard of the American chain.
To look on the bright side, at least these linguistic acrobatics are a more sophisticated form of trademark theft than often emerges from China. There are only so many pairs of Cnovesre sneakers and Daiads trainers you can see before the joke starts to wear thin, and a crocodile on a shirt will always look like a Lacoste copy, whatever colour it may be.
But these methods also present a fresh set of challenges for companies that like to keep an eye on their trademarks around the world. Trademark watching is a thriving industry, and very useful it is too, but the drawback is that many such services operate solely on an automated basis. That’s all very well when the infringement is direct, with the same set of words as a company’s own trademark being used, but sly transliteration across alphabetic barriers can slip past even the sharpest software.
Catching these kinds of cases requires the skills of that outdated piece of machinery, the human being. Automated systems are fine for the basics, but real live people can spot linguistic tricks that can easily elude the straight-thinking electronic brain. At their best, they’re even more reliable than Google. At least in China, anyway.
This article first appeared in the IP Review 2010 INTA supplement
Picture: source
