But James Omond, who heads up commercial law firm Omond & Co, disagrees.
“I think that from a legal perspective, CUB is in a very difficult position with this,” Omond told StartupSmart.
“The trademark legislation does have a ‘Use it or lose it’ policy, which says that from when you register your trademark you have five years to use it.
“Once it’s been registered for more than five years, if you don’t use it in a three-year period then someone can bring an application to have it removed from the register for non-use.
“The purpose of that is so you don’t have someone who sits on trademarks for decades without using them.”
However, Omond isn’t convinced Thunder Road will successfully obtain every single trademark.
“The trademarks office will have to look at them on a case-by-case basis,” he says.
“The more recent the trademark, say from the 1960s, the more chance CUB will have… because there might be someone out there who might remember the mark.
“That doesn’t mean they should be able to keep it on the register. If the marks are that important, they should have used them at some stage.”
Nevertheless, Omond believes Thunder Road’s willingness to take on CUB is a “courageous move”.
“If I was advising them, I’d say firstly, ‘You want to allow quite a bit of money in the budget to fight it’,” he says.
“If you lose the case down the track then you’re going to be up for more cases, and you’ll also have to withdraw the product from the market and all that sort of stuff.
“They need to take a long-term view of what they can achieve with this and not rush out with the commercial product before they get the legal issues sorted.”
Comment was sought from Thunder Road and CUB but neither was reached in time for publication.
