The Polish court ordered the owner Internetowykantor.pl and the Walutomat website, an online currency exchange service platform, to apologize and pay compensation to Cinkciarz.pl, the company from Conotoxia Holding, and donate an additional amount to charity.
Also, sites against which court decisions have been made should refrain from the illegal practice of using a competitor’s name as a keyword in Google ads (formerly AdWords).
Cinkciarz.pl was represented by the law firms SSW Pragmatic Solutions and SK&S. The trial began due to the use of the name of this site in various variations as a keyword for advertising virtual platforms of competitors in the Google search engine.
Currency One, the structure of which includes Internetowykantor.pl and Walutomat, continued the illegal practice, despite the preliminary judicial notification of the unlawful nature of the actions. In 2013 Cinkciarz.pl initiated a lawsuit and received an injunction for the entire period of the trial.
The defendant claimed that the plaintiff’s trademarks were invalid. Because of this statement, parallel proceedings were begun in the Supreme Administrative Court of Poland and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
Cinkciarz.pl received a positive decision during a parallel trial held in the Supreme Administrative Court of Poland and the European Court of Human Rights. The decisions of these courts confirm that the Polish word “cinkciarz”, used by native speakers of this language to describe illegal activities, is currently not actively used and for this reason, can become a registered trademark and brand name.
At the end of May, a court in the Polish city of Poznan decided to prohibit Currency One from refraining from using the word that has gone out of mass use and its variations in advertisements. The defendant will also pay the plaintiff more than 2 million Polish zloty (about 440 thousand euros) as compensation.
Marcin Pioro, Founder and President of the company Cinkciarz.pl, stated that his company would seek to revise the amount of compensation upward, noting that, in the opinion of the firm’s management, there is every right to challenge this and receive more financial funds.
As we have reported earlier, NYDFS Fines OneMain for Cybersecurity Violations.
