The High Court concluded that Cooley Distillery’s St. Patrick whiskey label was sufficiently similar to Irish Distillers’ Jameson label to create a likelihood of confusion among the public. The judgment records that conclusion on the balance of probabilities. The supplied text does not include the court’s formal orders, so the precise relief granted cannot be confirmed from it.
Irish Distillers brought proceedings seeking to restrain Cooley from using the label and seeking other relief, including damages. It argued that the St. Patrick label copied substantial features of Jameson’s and could lead consumers to believe the whiskey came from the same source. Cooley denied infringement and said the products were distinct. It maintained that a Russian distributor, Rotor House, had commissioned the label from a Russian design studio.
The dispute concerned whiskey made, bottled and labelled in Ireland and distributed in Russia. The court noted evidence of one instance in which Jameson had been ordered and billed at a bar in Perm, but St. Patrick was served. It also considered evidence that St. Patrick appeared among Jameson products on a retail shelf where Irish Distillers had paid for dedicated product space.
The judge accepted that the labels created a similar general visual impression, while noting that the names differed clearly in lettering, meaning and sound. The judgment distinguished between settings: it said confusion in a bar should not occur absent an unscrupulous bartender, but that supermarket or off-sales customers selecting a bottle could be confused by the colour and other features of the label.
The court considered expert opinions on the Russian market, including evidence that the different product names would not necessarily reduce the risk of confusion. It also reviewed a report from the Russian State Education Institute of Intellectual Property, which found no confusing similarity in the labels. The judge observed that the report’s comparison appeared focused on verbal elements and did not, in the court’s view, resolve the question of overall visual impression.
The court held that Irish proceedings could be maintained because the label was affixed to the product in Ireland, even though the whiskey was sold outside the European Union. It concluded that Cooley had used a sign similar to the registered Jameson mark for identical goods and that a likelihood of confusion existed. The text provided ends at that conclusion and does not state whether an injunction, damages, or any other order was made.