Contributed by attorney-at-law Inga Lukauskiene


On June 8, 2006, The Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania passed an amendment law to the Chapter X and Article 56 of the Law on Trademarks of the Republic of Lithuania, which took effect on 28 June, 2006.


By this amendment law the trademark law of the Republic of Lithuania was coordinated to European Parliament and Council directive 2004/48/EB of April 29, 2006, concerning intellectual property protection.


Chapter X of the amended trademark law regulates the ways of the protection of trademark rights. Therefore the amendments of the law adjusted the latter: the right to file the claim with court for a non-exclusive license holder was cancelled (however, the holder of the exclusive license has a right to file the claim with court even without informing the owner of the trademark that was being used.). Moreover, the possibility to claim moral damages was cancelled as well as to claim the adjudgement of compensation, calculated due to the legal market price of a certain trademark or service. Other innovations of the trademark law – a possibility to request the court to apply additional, different then the Civil Process Codex foresees, interim injunctions – to forbid individuals to infringe or oblige to terminate the infringement contemporarily (Article 50³). These interim injunctions are especially relevant for dealing with infringement on the trademark rights disputes, because the cases of this category usually continue more than a year. Therefore, during this period the owner of the trademark is condemned to observe the non-prohibited infringement of his/her rights, even though it is very obvious.


The law details the ways of material damage calculation (Article 51): for instance, instead of claiming damages it is possible to request a reward of the same sum of money that could have been earned if a certain trademark had been used legally. The offender, being negligent seriously and intentionally the law foresees the reward twice as big as the predicted profit if the trademark was being used. In the case when an offender acts without knowing that he/she breaks the laws, the court can sue out the profit made by an offender, etc.


This law provides with one more innovation – a possibility to obligate the offender to announce the information about the passed ruling (Article 51¹). Such a measure should be really effective regarding not only the actual offender, but it should discipline the other potential offenders as well, because often the society does not have the information that the trademark was used illegally. The amended law is supplemented with provisions, resulting from the rules of the Civil Process. The adopted provisions are: the right to get information about the producers, circulators, suppliers, the names of previous owners (titles) and addresses, the number of the items and price; the right to request the proofs from the offender of the rights or third party groups; a possibility to warrant proofs; the right to file the counter-claim, etc. The provisions of the amended Law on Trademarks, Chapter X in accordance to the supplemented law, Article 56 (with a few exceptions) are going to be applied for the defense of geographical indications as well.