From Russia with trademark love

If you read this newsletter regularly, and I hope you do, that means you are obviously one of the smartest, most attractive, and most charming people on the internet. That’s why I’m going to share some information with you to make you a more informed reader of automotive content.

Let’s talk about patents and trademarks.

You’re probably already familiar with the concept of a patent or a trademark. You likely understand the need to have protections in place to prevent people from stealing and profiting from your ideas.

In the automotive space, there are dozens of publications that spend some time looking at the latest patent or trademark applications from an automaker, and attempt to read the tea leaves on a future product that might be on the way.

To be clear, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with doing this. There isn’t. But the appropriate context is necessary to understand what a patent might mean, and what it might not mean, and the consequences of such.

Sometimes, automakers want to protect something they are about to launch. They might trademark a name or patent a technology. In the case of a future product, the automaker wants to make sure nobody steals the name or idea before the product is even announced, so they work to protect their assets. That makes sense.

In many other cases, a company will trademark a name or patent an idea to prevent others from using it. In the case of a name, it’s to prevent a competitor from using it. You don’t want to be Ford and have Stellantis come along and use the name Pinto, do you? Wait, don’t answer that.

In other cases, your company might come up with an idea they might use in the future — headlights powered by a star going supernova — and you don’t want your competitor to beat you to the punch.

In some egregious scenarios, there are patent trolls. They patent everything they can think of in hopes of extorting a usage or licensing fee out of a company that wants to use the technology.

The point is, sometimes a patent application is for a future product. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes a company renews a trademark because it wants to make sure nobody else can use its name in the meantime.

A friend of the newsletter recently sent me a link talking about a situation where too much was read into a trademark application. In Russia, which is currently under sanctions and most companies have stopped doing business with, Hyundai renewed its trademarks.

Pro-Kremlin influencers — which is most of Twitter these days — took that as a sign that Hyundai was going to re-enter the Russian market and that “everyone is coming back” to Russia.

This, of course, isn’t true. In a statement to Korea JoongAng Daily, the trademarks were “not a preliminary step aimed at entering a specific country, but rather part of Hyundai’s routine efforts to maintain brand rights globally.”

According to NewsGuard’s Reality Check, the equivalent of $1,500 USD is all that’s needed to take over a trademark that hasn’t been used in three years. Obviously, Hyundai would not want that to happen, even if it never returns to the Russian market.

Before the war, Hyundai was the third biggest seller in Russia. Kia, also part of HMG, was ahead of it, along with Russian-made Ladas.

These same pro-Kremlin sources, which I must reiterate are basically bots on a social network run by a white supremacist, so you shouldn’t really be on there, made similar claims about Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola when they renewed their trademarks.

So the two big takeaways here are: