The Supreme People's Court Heard the Christian Dior's Trademark Administrative Controversy in Public

In August 2014, the international trademark registrant Dior applied for the territorial extension protection to China according to the rule of world intellectual property rights, as it was registered with international registration. On 13rd July 2015, the Trademark Office of the State Administration for Industry and Commerce issued to the applicant a notice of rejection.

Within the legal time limit, Dior submitted an application for review to the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board. On 22nd February 2016, the Trademark Review and Adjudication Board dismissed the decision of a review. Then Dior brought an administrative lawsuit. But it lost the case in both first and second instance. Therefore, Dior applied for a retrial application to the Supreme People's Court. On 26th April 2018, Tao Kaiyuan, the vice president of the Supreme People's Court and Grand Justice of the People's Republic of China, served as the chief judge and heard the case in public. More specifically, the case was carried out in direct broadcast. And it made a judgment in court, which revoked the judgments of first and second instance and the administrative decision of the Board, as well as requesting the Board to make a new decision.

The case was foreign-related, as the retrial applicant Dior was a French company. It proposed the application of territorial extension to China through the World Intellectual Property Organization according to the Madrid Agreement on the International Registration of Trademarks and the Protocol related to the Madrid Agreement for the International Registration of Trademarks. Then the Trademark Office of China examined the trademark according to Chinese Trademark Law. In this case, the Trademark Office and the Trademark Review Board successively deemed that this trademark was not significant, and was not in conformity with the Chinese Trademark Law. The court supported that in the first and second instance. So the applicant applied for a retrial to the Supreme Court. According to the Supreme Court, the focus of this case were whether the decision was in violation of legal procedures and whether the trademark was significant. It turned out that the trademark involved was not three-dimensional trademark that applicant requested for protection, which belongs to fact errors. And it also can be identified as significant.