You win some, you lose some
“JLR’S brand police are certainly working overtime. An artist I know received an email telling him he was guilty of trademark infringement”
IN recent years, JLR executives haven’t been shy about calling in the lawyers if they felt that Land Rover’s brand or intellectual property rights were being infringed. Such infringement has been a huge problem for western companies for the past ten years or more: manufacturers in the Far East nicking their designs and making cheap imitations or outright copies and flooding the market with them. Everything from high-end watches to handbags and other designer goods have been copied and online auction sites are full of this stuff.
But copy cars are another matter entirely. When JLR launched the Evoque in China in 2014, it suddenly found itself facing an interesting competitor. Local car manufacturer Jiangling Motors introduced a vehicle called the Landwind X7 that bore a startling resemblance to the Evoque, and it was a lot cheaper. You could buy three X7s for the same price as an Evoque, and to add insult to injury you could buy aftermarket kits with replica Evoque grilles, lights and badges.
JLR was understandably unimpressed and sued the makers of the X7 for infringement of intellectual property. The case was thrown out by the Chinese courts in 2015, and JLR boss Sir Ralf Speth said at the time that there was little that JLR could do since there are no laws against copying cars. But in 2016 JLR sued again, this time for copyright infringement and unfair competition, and amazingly the Beijing court decided in March 2019 that the X7 copied five Evoque unique design elements, and Jiangling Motors was ordered to cease production and pay compensation to JLR. It was hailed as a landmark ruling and a first in the global automotive industry, and other car makers are apparently considering taking legal action for what they believe are similar breaches of their own intellectual property.
JLR was right to pursue the case and I’m delighted it won. But I don’t feel quite so positive about some of its other recent legal interventions. When the company announced that Defender production would end, Britain’s thirdwealthiest man made his displeasure known. Sir Jim Ratcliffe has been a fan of the utility Land Rover for many years, but he didn’t accept JLR’S reasons for ending the Defender and promptly announced that he would build his own version that would treat the Defender’s ‘much-loved shape like a listed building’. He even proposed to buy the production line and tooling from JLR, which was apparently quite positive about this at first, before changing its mind and rejecting the offer.
Ratcliffe went ahead with his plans to develop and launch his new vehicle, signing a deal with Mercedes-owned MB Tech and announcing recently that the Grenadier will be assembled in Wales.
JLR must have been rattled by the prospect of a new vehicle appearing on the scene that might look something like the old Defender, and of course its own plans were already well-advanced regarding the Defender’s replacement, launched at last September’s Frankfurt Motor Show. So JLR’S response was to try to register the shape of six variants of the utility Land Rover from 1948 to 2016 and have these ratified as trademarks, even though production of the vehicle had already ended.
The government’s Intellectual Property Office was unimpressed, though, and ruled that the Defender shape was not sufficiently distinctive from other 4x4s to justify the trademarks. The focus was on whether aspects of the design and shape of the Defender and its predecessors varied in a significant way from ‘the norm’ for utility vehicles, and JLR’S argument was that things like the alpine and rear quarter-panel windows, rear-mounted spare and so on were unique enough to merit the overall shape of the vehicle being registered as a trademark.
The hearing compared the Defender with other vehicles including the G-wagen, the Santana PS10, the Shogun, the J70, the Wrangler, the Fourtrak and the Taft. As part of its submission, JLR surveyed 495 people across the UK to see if they recognised a picture of a 90 as a Land Rover and, while 20% immediately did, rather unhelpfully another 10% identified it as a Jeep! The hearing ruled against JLR’S application, concluding that the Defender was not materially different from ‘the norms in the passenger car sector’. JLR hasn’t given up and is contesting the ruling at the High Court.
And all this, of course, before any of us have even seen the shape of Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s new Grenadier. At least in the case of the shameful Landwind X7 there was a car in the metal that JLR could argue was an infringement, and any right-minded person could look at it and compare it with the Evoque, as a great many of us did, and conclude that the Landwind was a pretty obvious rip-off!
JLR’S brand police are certainly working overtime, though. An artist and illustrator I know received an email the other day telling him he was guilty of ‘trademark infringement’. His crime was to describe a limited-edition print of a Land Rover he was offering for sale online as, yes, you guessed it, a ‘Land Rover’. Apparently, he cannot use these two words to describe his picture of a Land Rover, so he promptly showed what he thought of this nonsense by renaming the print ‘Lånd Røver Lurmited Ædition Printske’. No doubt he’ll be getting another email soon from the Lånd Røver brand police.