A Russian businessman says that he has trade marked the emoticon and that commercial uses of punctuation marks to convey a wink will require a licence costing over $10,000. A trade mark attorney said that his demands will be irrelevant to uses in the EU.The BBC reports that entrepreneur Oleg Teterin claims that his registration for a trade mark over the sequence of semi-colon, hyphen and closed-parenthesis – 😉 – has been granted by Russia’s federal patent agency.
http://out-law.com/page-9657
Why an emoticon won’t get a trade mark in the EU :-(
A Russian businessman says that he has trade marked the emoticon and that commercial uses of punctuation marks to convey a wink will require a licence costing over $10,000. A trade mark attorney said that his demands will be irrelevant to uses in the EU.