The Metropolitan threw a “Look” at Rospatent
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The Moscow metro, which is getting rid of the English name Face Pay, has applied for registration of the Vzglyad brand for biometrics and fare payment systems. The option of renaming the biometrics payment system to “Pay with a glance” was considered back in 2022. Lawyers note that the Vzglyad brand has already been registered in other classes of goods and services, but the subway’s application is specific enough to exclude intersections with already registered signs.
State Unitary Enterprise “Moscow Metro” sent an application to Rospatent for registration of the word “look” as a trademark. The appeal was filed on August 11 and covers facial recognition equipment and systems, biometric identification services, fare payment, money transfer, and “storage of data or documents in electronic devices.”
In the subway, where the fare payment system works by face recognition, they explained to Kommersant that they “decided to apply for registration of the national name of the biometric service.” According to the organization, many passengers in appeals to the metro on the topic of using the service say that they “paid at a glance” or “passed at a glance”.
Fare recognition system launched in the metro in October 2021. According to the metro, more than 320 thousand people use the service. Initially, the payment method was called Face Pay, in 2023 it was renamed to Biometrics Payment. Among the previews of the new title, unveiled in December 2022, was “Pay with a Look”. In the course of voting on the Active Citizen municipal portal, he received 14% of the votes, the first place was taken by the Biometric Payment System option (21%).
Recently, the Moscow metro has been getting rid of English-language duplication of inscriptions – in particular, signs at new metro stations are made only in Russian.
“Vzglyad” is a word too widely used to “close it with a trademark,” Kommersant was told at RecFaces, a developer of biometric solutions: “But this particular word will not interfere with us. We don’t even have the word “look” in the semantic core, and we don’t plan to use it.” Other developers of biometric systems interviewed by Kommersant did not respond to a request. The National Payment Card System said the subway’s plans are not related to NSPK’s plans to test its own payment system using biometrics.
The Rospatent database already has valid wordmarks “Vzglyad”, including in the same service classes as in the application of the Moscow Metro, “but the coincidence of classes does not necessarily indicate the homogeneity of services,” says Ekaterina, lawyer of the Moscow CCA “DBA and Partners” Abashina. Earlier trademarks “Vzglyad”, according to her, are registered in relation to goods and services not related to biometric identification.
However, Viktoria Makarova, Deputy Head of Trademark Practice at Online Patent, clarifies, the coincidence in classes “presumably will complicate the registration of the mark and require additional actions, for example, obtaining written consents from the copyright holders of opposed trademarks.”
The applicant probably “deliberately added very specific categories to the list of goods and services in order to minimize the likelihood of opposition,” says Anastasia Skovpen, an intellectual property lawyer. She notes that, as a general rule, Rospatent has the right to refuse registration of signs consisting of a descriptive word, for example, one that directly indicates the purpose or composition of the goods: “From the description of the list of goods and services, it is not obvious that the word “View” will be recognized as descriptive. So the possibility of an absolute ground for refusal can be ruled out.”
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