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GUYANA


GUYANA


TO STEM THE TRADE IN COUNTERFEIT GOODS, PROPRIETORS OF TRADEMARKS MUST FIRST GET THEIR MARK PROTECTED BY LOCAL REGISTRATION AND THEN, IF AND WHEN THE MARK HAS BEEN INFRINGED, LAUNCH THEIR OWN ACTION IN THE LOCAL COURTS.


has a significant advantage in that the date of local registration is the date of the UK registration.


Te effect of this pre-dating is illustrated by two cases argued by the firm.


In Florsheim Shoe Co v Cameron, a local cobbler registered the trademark Florsheim in his name. Florsheim Shoe Company of the UK, who were the genuine owners of the mark but had not registered it in Guyana at the time of the local registration, applied for and obtained registration of the mark in Part C of the Guyana register based upon the UK registration. This had the effect of making the Part C registration predate the date of the local registration. The plaintiff was then successfully able to bring an action against the defendant to have his mark expunged from the register on the ground that at the time the defendant’s mark was accepted for registration, the plaintiff ’s mark (by virtue of its pre-dated UK registration) was already on the register.


The Florsheim case was followed some 40 years later in the LALAH’S Curry Powder case, when in 1988, a local condiment manufacturer, Ricks & Sari Industries Ltd, registered the plaintiff ’s trademark


142 World Intellectual Property Review e-Digest 2012


as its own. The strategy employed in the Florsheim case was again successfully used and resulted in the Ricks & Sari registration being expunged from the register.


The only genuine copyright case, namely Rudolph Grant v Banks DIH Ltd and Guyenterprise Ltd, was successfully defended by this firm in 1998. In that case, the plaintiff was unsuccessful in his claim that the defendants had infringed his copyright in a sound recording entitled Mash in Guyana. A rare civil no-case submission was upheld by the court after the evidence revealed that it was not the defendants who had infringed the plaintiff ’s copyright as alleged and that in any event that the plaintiff had failed to prove, as required by the UK Copyright Act 1956, that the record bore any label identifying him as the copyright owner.


The inadequacy of Guyana’s copyright law has resulted, and continues to result, in difficulties in registering copyright and widespread copyright infringement. Businesses making and selling pirated CDs, DVDs and text books operate openly and with impunity, and are widely


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