Apple failed to drive out "duplicates" from Yandex.Market.

The Russian company Yandex successfully resisted pressure from Apple and did not fulfill the demands of the Americans. Last year, Apple turned to the owners of Yandex.Market with a request to remove stores that use the word “apple” in the domain name from the catalog. Apple complained about the complaint to the leading lawyer of Yandex, Sergey Kuchushev, during a meeting of the working group at the expert council of the Federal Antimonopoly Service for the Protection of Competition in the E-commerce business, Kommersant reports .

“The apple trademark in relation to the sale of goods through intermediaries for the sale of goods and for stores with the priority belongs to Unitop LLC,” explained Sergey Kushushev. According to Rospatent, LLC Junitop filed an application for registration of the Apple trademark in December 1995.

The online shop Yunitop sells perfumes, including toilet water called Apple, on the packaging of which is drawn a device similar to the iPhone.

About 60 active online stores that use the word “apple” in their domain name in Runet, the general director of Infoline-analyst Mikhail Burmistrov told Kommersant. In his opinion, Apple’s actions in relation to such stores are caused by the desire of the manufacturer to increase the flow of customers to its Russian online store Apple Store, which is also represented in Yandex.Market.
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“The names of some stores are confusingly similar to it and mislead consumers,” says Burmistrov. The head of the apple-ts.ru online store, Nikolay Smorygo, told Kommersant that disconnecting the store from Yandex.Market would be very critical for business. According to him, more than 50% of customers come to his website from Yandex.Market and other aggregators. If the site under pressure from the manufacturer will have to change the domain name, it will lead to lower sales and higher advertising costs for the new name, said Nikolai Smorygo.

A spokesman for Yandex Asya Melkumova clarified that a similar claim was made in November 2013 and not by Apple, but by a company allegedly representing Apple, and this was referred to as an example from long-standing practice. Now Apple has no complaints about Yandex.

In this story there is a nuance: earlier, Yandex fulfilled the similar requirements of Samsung and Miele, but only after a corresponding court decision.



By the way, in Russia, after the devaluation of the national currency, sales of Apple equipment rose sharply. Tourists from the surrounding countries come here specifically to buy cheaper (in dollars) "iPhones". There are no countries in Europe where these gadgets would be cheaper than in Russia. Sales have grown so much that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have already become a deficit.