Starbucks wins name spat
Shanghai Daily
Xu Fang
THE Shanghai No. 2 Intermediate People's Court yesterday ordered Shanghai Xingbake Cafe Co Ltd and its Nanjing Road branch to drop the word "Xingbake" from its name.
The court ruled Xingbake has conducted illegal competition. It was also ordered to pay 500,000 yuan (US$61,728) to Starbucks Corporation, which uses Xingbake as its Chinese name, and run a public apology in the Xinmin Evening News.
In Chinese, "Xing" means star and "bake" sounds a little like bucks.
Judges said this is the first verdict that local courts have made on infringement of a famous international trademark since the revised Trademark Law was enacted on December 1, 2001.
Starbucks, which started selling coffee in America in 1971, said it registered a series of trademarks related to Starbucks, including its Chinese translation, from 1996 to 2003 on the mainland. The logo it uses is a mermaid in a circle with a green background.
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posted by Robert @ 1/01/2006
1 Comments
1 Comments:
The problem is the “Star” in Starbucks does not mean “star” but rather it was from the classic American novel Moby Dick. Yes, “Bake” (??) in Chinese sounds close to “Bucks”, but there are hundreds more Chinese character pairs would sound close or even closer to the word Bucks. The key should not be about the words or characters, the sound, or even the logos, but rather simply who came first!
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