An American startup registered the Gram ™ trademark earlier than Telegram. There will be a trial

Telegram Messenger Inc. filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against the California cryptostartape Lantah LLC, which can issue Gram cryptocurrency earlier than Telegram itself. The plaintiff from the British Virgin Islands accuses the American respondent of violating the right to the Gram trademark, for which $ 1.7 billion of investment has already been collected from about 200 accredited investors from around the world, including from Russia.

The problem is that Lantah LLC applied for a trademark on February 25, 2018. Telegram began to collect investments at the end of January 2018, without having the rights to the trademark and not registering it properly. But the company insists that it "approved" its right to Gram earlier than Lantah applied for.

Owner Lantah LLC Daniel Jeffrey (Daniel Jeffrey) says that his company used the trademark Gram before it became aware of its use by Telegram. In favor of the defendant, Telegram may have played a closed placement, and the prospectuses for investors were not published in the public domain.
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The Lantah website states that the company is going to build a trading platform on the blockchain, and the name Gram is chosen as a derivative of the metric measurement system - “you can get a kilogram or milligram”. The startup even announces plans for ICO for $ 350 million.

On March 9, 2018, the company reported to the SEC about attracting investments of $ 4.3 million, so she also has money for lawyers. Perhaps the American firm’s lawyers are even better than the Durov brothers.

The lawsuit was filed on May 11, 2018. Telegram claims that it entered into agreements with investors for the sale of Gram back in January, therefore the company has priority rights to the trademark and it did not need to register the rights to Gram. The rights to a trademark in this case are protected by “common law”, the lawsuit states.

The trial is followed with interest by investors who have invested heavily in the TON platform and thereby purchased the rights to millions of Gram tokens. In a commentary to the Vedomosti newspaper, lawyer Nektorov, Saveliev & Partners, Oleg Volkov, explains that, according to US law, a person who previously used a trademark in a commercial activity has priority over a person who submitted an application for registration of this sign after it began to be used by another company. To win a case, Telegram needs to prove that it began to use the trademark publicly in its commercial activities prior to submitting registration to the trademark by another person. But what date should be considered the starting point for using the trademark - the court will determine.

Yevgeny Krasnov, a lawyer of Buzko & Partners, practicing in the American market, confirmed to Vedomosti that the USA is almost the only country in which trademark rights are acquired on the basis of commercial use, rather than registration. The lawyer considers Telegram to have a high chance of winning a case.

However, in the process may be revealed new circumstances. Since Daniel Jeffrey has already stated that his company used the Gram trademark before Telegram's intention to create a product with the same name became known, evidence of this might appear. And here the court will decide who earlier began the “commercial use” of the Gram trademark.

In Europe, Telegram Messenger Inc. only on April 25, 2018 filed an application with the European Intellectual Property Office for the registration of rights to the Gram trademark. Apparently, in Europe, no one had time to fuss with the registration of this trademark, so there should be no court proceedings. But in general, the situation with the “theft” of cryptocurrency names resembles the situation with phishing, when users are lured to sites with a similar name. Here, too, some businessmen are trying to sell fake tokens under the guise of real ones to inattentive investors.

Gram should become a native cryptocurrency for the global global platform Telegram Open Network (TON) - the blockchain of a new generation that replaces Bitcoin and Etherium.