A shop in Wuxi of Jiangsu province was sued by Rudolf Dassler Sporting Goods for infringing its figurative trademark of a puma animal. The plaintiff Puma eventually settled with the defendant in Wuxi's Binhu district court recently.

Puma claimed it registered it trademarks of Puma, puma animal figure, and the combination of the two in 1991 and use all of them in mass coverage. After discovering counterfeit Puma socks for sale in the shop in Wuxi in the early of 2011, Puma did a notarization and then filed suit to the court on the ground of peddling counterfeit Pumas by the shop, sought tens of thousands of yuan in damages and asked the defendant to make a public apology statement.

The Court held that the defendant's act infringed Puma's trademark rights which would also cause confusion among consumers. Under the mediation in the Wuxi Binhu district court, finally, the two sides agreed to settle.

(China IP News)