The EU General Court has dismissed as manifestly unfounded an action challenging the cancellation of an EU trade mark that its own owner admitted it had never intended to use. The case is T-650/25, Vacu Activ Marcin Leśniak v EUIPO — Lakhomoff and AR Group Roman Tchir (VACUACTIVUS), reported by The IPKat. According to the notice of the action published in the EU Official Journal, the proceedings were brought on 22 September 2025 against the decision of EUIPO’s First Board of Appeal of 22 July 2025 in Case R 1648/2024-1, and concerned EU figurative mark No 18 700 589 (VACUACTIVUS) and the absolute ground of invalidity for bad faith under Article 59(1)(b) EUTMR.
The commercial history matters, because it is what makes the filing look defensive rather than dishonest at first glance. As The IPKat sets out, the Polish company Vacu Activ owns a national word mark “Vacu Activ” filed in 2008 and an EU figurative mark filed in 2018, both covering fitness machines in classes 10 and 28. In 2013 it appointed a company owned by Mr Lakhomoff as its exclusive distributor for the United States, Canada and Mexico, on an initial five-year term later extended geographically to Oceania and in time to 31 May 2022. On 15 April 2019 Mr Lakhomoff filed a figurative VACUACTIVUS sign at the USPTO in his own name; it registered on 29 October 2019 for goods in classes 10 and 28 that were partly identical to Vacu Activ’s, and was then extended to the EU through the Madrid System. On 10 May 2022 — weeks before the distribution agreement was due to expire — Vacu Activ filed the contested EU figurative mark. Mr Lakhomoff applied to invalidate it for bad faith, EUIPO agreed, the Board of Appeal confirmed, and the General Court has now refused to disturb that finding.
The reasoning is short because Vacu Activ supplied the decisive fact itself. It told EUIPO that it had filed the contested mark because of the similarity between Mr Lakhomoff’s VACUACTIVUS sign and its own earlier marks, in order to prevent any infringement of them. The Court treated that as an admission: the mark was filed with the sole aim of stopping Mr Lakhomoff obtaining EU protection, there was no commercial logic behind it, and no intention to use it. Three further arguments failed. The dispute over who had originated the sign was irrelevant, because even if VACUACTIVUS had been derived from Vacu Activ’s own marks, long use of “Vacu Activ” confers no rights over a separate though similar sign. The distribution agreement did not help either — it governed the export of Vacu Activ machines, not the use of the VACUACTIVUS sign, so a breach of it could not legitimise the filing. And the argument under Article 6septies of the Paris Convention, that Mr Lakhomoff had acted as a disloyal agent, was turned back on the applicant: that complaint could have been raised in the proper forum, before the USPTO or against the international registration at EUIPO, and raising it did not justify filing an EU mark solely to block him.
What this changes
Most trade mark portfolios contain at least one filing that exists only to stop somebody else. The “defensive” or “blocking” application is standard practice in-house, it is cheap, and it is usually framed as risk management rather than aggression. T-650/25 is a reminder that EU law does not recognise that framing. Bad faith under Article 59(1)(b) is assessed by reference to intention at the filing date, and an intention to deny a competitor a registration — with no intention to use the sign yourself — is squarely within it. The provocation does not matter. As The IPKat puts it, there is no self-defence defence: bad faith is not cured by pointing at somebody else’s.
The practical consequence is worse than losing the blocking mark. An invalidity decision on bad faith is a finding about your conduct, and it sits on the public register of a dispute that is usually still running elsewhere. In this matter it plainly is: USPTO records show three parallel proceedings opened at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on 20 and 21 October 2025 — by Vacu Activ Marcin Lesniak, and by Marcin Lesniak personally — Opposition No. 91302590 against Mr Lakhomoff’s pending application Ser. No. 97465292 for VACUACTIVUS/MEDSTARCOM WORLD LEADING MANUFACTURER, and Cancellation Nos. 92089842 and 92089843 against Registrations 5885219 and 6304096. All three were consolidated on 8 January 2026 and suspended pending the disposition of a civil action. The blocking EUTM bought nothing that those proceedings were not already pursuing, and it handed the other side a clean bad-faith finding to deploy in them.
So what should a brand owner in this position actually do? The answer the General Court gave is unglamorous: attack the other party’s right, in the forum where that right exists. Where a distributor or agent has registered a sign in its own name, the EU route is an objection to that registration — opposition against the EU designation of the international registration while the window is open, or invalidity afterwards — not a counter-filing of your own. That turns the problem into a docketing problem. A Madrid designation of the EU becomes vulnerable on a published date and closes on a fixed one; miss it and you are pushed into invalidity proceedings that cost several times as much and carry a heavier evidential burden. Here the distributor’s US filing happened in April 2019 and the EU designation followed, yet the response came in May 2022 and took the wrong form. Watching your own distributors’ and licensees’ filings, in every territory you have appointed them for, and docketing the opposition windows those filings open, is the control that would have made a blocking application unnecessary.
Two drafting points follow for anyone appointing a distributor. First, the agreement in this case covered the export of machines and said nothing about signs, which is why it was useless when the fight came. A distribution or reseller agreement should state expressly that the principal owns all marks used on or in connection with the goods, including any variant, translation or derivative developed during the relationship; that the distributor will not apply to register any such sign anywhere in the world; and that it will assign on demand anything it does file. Second, build in a worldwide filing-notification obligation and a survival clause, because the exposure peaks exactly where it did here — in the months around termination, when the distributor still has goodwill in the market and no longer has a contract to lose.
The last lesson is about evidence, and it is the cheapest one to act on. Vacu Activ was not defeated by documents the other side unearthed; it was defeated by its own explanation of why it had filed. Once a bad-faith allegation is live, every submission is an opportunity to concede intention, and “we filed it to stop them” is a concession. The Court also confirmed that disagreeing with how the Board of Appeal weighed two competing accounts is not a breach of the duty of good administration under Article 94(1) EUTMR — EU proceedings apply free evaluation of evidence, requiring only that it be cogent, consistent, reliable and factually accurate. In other words, the Board’s preference for one party’s version is close to unreviewable, which means the record you build at first instance is the record you are stuck with. Before any defensive filing is made, the question to ask is whether a clearance and watch search plus a timely opposition would get you the same outcome without creating a mark you will later have to explain.
Reported by PerspireIP. The facts of T-650/25 are summarised from The IPKat’s report and from the Official Journal notice of the action; the General Court’s judgment text was not accessible to us directly, and the ruling is described here as those sources describe it. The TTAB proceeding details are taken from the USPTO’s TTABVUE records as at 30 October 2026.