On March 13, 2009, the NTA-Privolzhye news agency disseminated a message that the Chamber for Patent Disputes of the Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks (Rospatent) made a preliminary decision on the legality of registration of the Sarova trademark by the Mineral Water and Beverages (MVN) company, located in Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod Region. The plaintiff, the Greentown company, challenged the rights of MVN to the Sarov mark on the basis that Sarov is the name of the locality, which is the place of production of the goods. According to the plaintiff, Russian legislation does not allow registering such a name as a trademark.
Natalia Vasilyeva, a patent attorney at the law firm Levant and Partners, notes that in June 2008, Rospatent also made a positive decision on an application for registration in Russia of a trademark consisting of a geographical name.

The company “Levant and Partners” represented the interests of a Finnish company in Rospatent, which claimed to protect a trademark consisting of the geographical name of the city where the production was located. The company’s products are chipboards. In accordance with the preliminary decision of the Rospatent examination, registration of the mark was refused on the basis of clause 1 of Article 6 of the Law of the Russian Federation “On Trademarks, Service Marks and Appellations of Origin of Goods.” The applied designation was recognized as unprotectable, as consisting solely of a geographical name, which is an indication of the location of the applicant and the place of production of the declared goods. In the response to the preliminary decision, filed on January 17, 2007 by the patent attorney of the law firm Levant and Partners, in particular, it was noted that in the locality in question there is no other industrial production, the village itself is not designated in publicly accessible geographies