Sunlight Loses Suit Over Jewelry Copying Worth 3.5 Million Rubles
A court ruling has shown that Sunlight, a jewelry brand owned by Solnechny Svet LLC, must pay 3.456 million rubles for infringing Leta brand designs. The decision rests on the court’s findings that the Leta designs, which appeared on Leta’s official site in mid 2020, were copied and later echoed in Sunlight collections. The legal action centers on exclusive rights held by Leta, and the ruling focuses on the similarities between the pieces in question and Leta’s previously created items.
Six articles of jewelry were identified as copies. The Sunlight lineup included three pairs of earrings and three matching rings, all crafted from heliolite and moonstone with gold-plated silver finishes. The court determined that Leta’s experts had designed the winning earrings and rings in 2019, and those designs were then commercialized by Leta in 2020. Within two years, Sunlight introduced comparable pieces under its own label, triggering the legal dispute.
The court ordered compensation to Leta for the violation of exclusive rights, totaling 3,456,000 rubles. The judgment underscores the importance of design originality and the protection of brand-associated concepts within the jewelry industry. Leta’s leadership has framed the ruling as a clear assertion of fair competition and the enforcement of intellectual property rights, noting that the Sunlight defense did not attend the hearing and instead submitted a request to refuse the claims through a written review.
Mikhail Tantsura, chief executive of Leta, commented on the proceedings, describing the absence of Sunlight at the meeting and the rejected attempt to dismiss the demands as a persuasive illustration of the case’s merit. The exchange highlights how brand identity and design elements can become the focal point of legal scrutiny when one label is believed to have infringed on another’s protected concepts.
The case echoes earlier allegations from Avgvst, dating back to 2018, in which Sunlight faced claims of copying jewelry designs. In that prior instance, Avgvst pointed to a timeline in which chupa-chups style jewelry was introduced by the Yekaterinburg brand in 2015, with Sunlight subsequently launching similar items for sale about three years later. The parallel narratives emphasize a pattern in which design motifs surface across brands, raising ongoing questions about intellectual property boundaries in the jewelry market. The legal action and its outcome illustrate how courts weigh originality, production timelines, and the potential for imitator products to blur distinctions between distinct brand portfolios.