Southern District Court of NY had previously declined to recognize transfer of STOLI marks to a quasi-government entity, FTE, thus holding that FTE had no standing to bring this infringement suit.  Second Circuit reverses:

“The declaration of a United States court that the executive branch of the Russian government violated its own law by transferring its own rights to its own quasi-governmental entity (FTE) would be an affront to the government of a foreign sovereign,”

Moscow Times coverage here.

Fun fact: STOLICHNAYA means ‘from the capital.”

Bad news: I have a search bar on the right column and I searched for STOLI.  I’ve been blogging about the STOLI dispute since 2003. However, between Scribd and DocStoc, most of the embedded docs are gone.  Good news: I’ve begun embedding docs like the decision below on my own server.  So maybe when you read this post ten years from now, you’ll be able to access the decision easily.

[embeddoc url=”https://www.schwimmerlegal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/833/2016/01/FTE-v-Spritis-Intl-2d-circuit-decision-STOLI-1.pdf”]