EU General Court: Filing a Trade Mark Only to Block a Former Distributor Is Bad Faith
Photo: sweetlouise / Pixabay
A brand owner cannot answer a rival's filing with a blocking filing of its own. That is the message of the EU General Court in Vacu Activ v EUIPO (VACUACTIVUS), case T-650/25, reported by the IPKat on 29 October 2026. The court dismissed the appeal as manifestly unfounded.
The Polish company Vacu Activ makes fitness machines and holds a Polish word mark from 2008 and an EU mark from 2018. From 2013 it used an exclusive distributor for North America, later also Oceania, under a contract that ran until 31 May 2022. In 2019 the distributor's owner registered a figurative VACUACTIVUS sign in the US and extended it to the EU through the Madrid System. In May 2022, weeks before the contract ended, Vacu Activ filed its own EU figurative mark for VACUACTIVUS. The distributor's side sought a declaration of invalidity for bad faith, and EUIPO and its Board of Appeal agreed.
The decisive evidence came from Vacu Activ itself. It had told EUIPO it filed the mark to stop infringement of its older marks and to prevent the other side from registering its sign in the EU, not to use it. The court said that was a filing aimed at harming a third party, with no commercial logic of its own. Disputes over who created the sign, alleged breaches of the distribution deal and Vacu Activ's long use of its own name did not change that. If the distributor had acted unfairly, the court said, the right response was to challenge its filings in the proper proceedings, including under the Paris Convention rule on agents who register a principal's mark.
Indonesian angle. Indonesian law also refuses and cancels marks filed in bad faith, and disputes between principals and local distributors are common at DJKI and in the Commercial Court. The ruling is a useful reminder: oppose or cancel a distributor's filing directly, and be careful what you write in your own applications and submissions.
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