Tidman Legal advises Santu Coffee

Tidman Legal was instructed by Santu Coffee to recover its trade mark following hijacking by a third party which was causing considerable disruption to its Edinburgh roastery. Here’s the background, what happened and how we successfully managed to resolve the matter to the client’s satisfaction.

Unbeknown to Santu Coffee, a third party had applied to register the word SANTU as a trade mark which protected coffee.

Outcome

We got involved and wrote to the other party in the hope of coming to a swift resolution. Unfortunately, we received no response from the other party and the trade mark continued to remain in their name.

Having provided sufficient notice in our initial correspondence, we then proceeded to apply to cancel the trade mark on the grounds that Santu Coffee had earlier, albeit unregistered, rights to the name.

The other party formally lodged a defence to our cancellation action. However, as they were unable to demonstrate evidence of earlier use, the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) decided in our favour and cancelled the trade mark owned by the other party. A word of warning – if the other party were able to demonstrate earlier use of the name, this would have been potentially very damaging to our case. Accordingly, taking such action is not without risk and therefore we would always recommend registering your business name as a trade mark before launching your new business.

Following the successful cancellation action, we then applied to protect Santu Coffee’s name to avoid any similar issues and business disruption in the future.

Santu Coffee was also awarded costs by the UK Intellectual Property Office and we succeeded in recovering these costs from the other party.

Following the successfully recovery of the business’ trade mark, Washington Vieira, Managing Director of Santu Coffee, said:

“We had an intellectual property problem that needed urgent attention and Mr. Tidman was impeccable with his services. We highly recommend Tidman Legal. We were the typical case of “do it yourself” in the early stages of our business and we made a few mistakes, but later on with the help of Mr. Tidman they were corrected. Moral of the story, let the professionals do it!”