Dodo Pizza sued Telegram for losing its name

Currently, the Telegram channel called Dodo pizza, mentioned in the judicial act, has 28 subscribers and four publications. One of them reports that the channel is for sale. Sale price – 575 thousand dollars, rent for one year – 57.5 thousand dollars.

“In Telegram there is a long-standing problem: channel names. Anyone can buy them at the auction, but creating others with the same name is prohibited according to the site’s rules,” said Alexandra Akimova, lead intellectual property and privacy lawyer at Dodo Pizza.

According to her, the following happens: any channel name is sold for the TON cryptocurrency, even if it belongs to a well-known brand, and then there are precedents for extortion by copyright holders, and for “huge sums.” However, the existing verification in Messenger will not eliminate such problems.

“The situation where any user can purchase a channel name identical to a well-known brand creates reputational risks for copyright holders and opens up opportunities for fraud and extortion,” said Yaroslav Shitsle, head of dispute resolution at IT and intellectual property law. company Rustam Kurmaev and partners.

The prospects of the claim, according to him, will depend on the presence of an important evidentiary basis, but so far the plaintiff’s arguments seem vague and generalized, since there is a reference to the presence of “a certain field for the activities of fraudsters “. ”, And these situations arise because there are certain loopholes in the rules of the messenger, he emphasized.

• The Dodo Pizza website reports that the chain currently operates in 22 countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Romania, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Lithuania, Estonia, Germany, Slovenia, China, Nigeria, Poland and Vietnam, etc. Number There are more than 1 thousand pizzerias.