Aviator v Spribe: London will hear Spribe's unfair competition claims for nine countries in one case

On 6 November 2026 Mr Justice Tappin handed down judgment in Aviator LLC & Ors v Spribe OÜ, [2026] EWHC 2840 (BP), the London proceedings over the AVIATOR crash game. Spribe, the Estonian-registered developer of the Aviator game, is the defendant and counterclaimant; the claimants are Aviator LLC and two Maltese Aviator Studio companies (with related parties), who offer a rival crash game under the Aviator name.

The judgment is interlocutory — nothing about the merits has been decided — but it changes the shape of the case considerably.

Nine countries, one forum

Spribe already had a pleaded claim for passing off in the UK, where the rival parties have been under an interim injunction since September 2025. It asked to add claims for passing off or unfair competition, and copyright infringement, in nine further countries — Canada, Colombia, Ghana, Italy, Kenya, Mexico, Romania, Serbia and South Africa — and in 28 others across Europe, Africa and Central and South America.

The judge allowed the claims for the nine, with some limits — copyright claims over Spribe’s “Provably Fair” text and graphics, for instance, stay confined to the UK — and refused the 28. For the wider group, Spribe had not properly pleaded a threat of launch in each country; an inference that the rival game would follow Spribe’s users was not enough.

Two points made the nine-country claim workable in London. The court accepted that it could presume the foreign laws to be materially similar to English law, because all those countries are bound by Article 10bis of the Paris Convention, which requires protection against confusion with a competitor — a broader standard than English passing off. And it held that England was the appropriate forum for hearing the claims together, rather than in separate proceedings in each country. According to The IPKat, it is the first time an English court has accepted that role for foreign passing off and unfair competition claims.

The injunction and the notice order

Pending trial, the rival parties may not launch or offer a crash game under the AVIATOR name or a colourably similar device targeted at Colombia, Romania or Serbia, or encourage third parties to do so. The order carves out platforms that were already offering the rival game on or before 3 July 2026, and Spribe gives a cross-undertaking covering affected third parties. The rival parties have liberty to apply to vary the order for Serbia, where they hold trade mark registrations.

For Canada and Italy, the court accepted undertakings to give 28 days’ notice before any launch; in Italy, the judgment notes, a demo version was already withdrawn following the Maltese injunction based on Spribe’s EU trade mark. For the 28 further countries, the rival parties must give at least two weeks’ notice of an expected launch, and must require such notice from their aggregators and operators.

The trial has been expedited to October 2027. A separate preliminary trial, in April 2027, will decide whether earlier judgments between the parties in Georgia give rise to issue estoppels in the London case.

The detection problem, in the court’s own words

The passage most relevant to every game studio is not about forum. It is about evidence.

The judge recorded it as common ground that game developers such as Spribe and its rival find it hard to know exactly where even their own games are offered. They contract with aggregators, who do not tell them which downstream operators take the game; even direct operator contracts may not say on which websites, apps or platforms it runs, or in which countries. Spribe’s evidence in July 2026 said that, to its knowledge, the rival game was not on the market in Colombia, Romania and Serbia. It was.

That is why the order turns on dates and platforms. The 3 July 2026 carve-out only works if someone can show which platforms carried the rival game before and after that date — and the court ordered the rival parties to produce, through their aggregators and operators, a list of platforms on which their game was available in the three countries on 3 July 2026.

What this means for you

For iGaming brand owners, the case shows two things at once.

First, the legal toolkit is broader than it looks. A single English action can carry claims for a dozen markets where the Paris Convention standard applies, alongside EU-wide trade mark relief from another forum. Fighting country by country is no longer the only route.

Second, every one of those tools depends on evidence the brand owner has to gather itself: which operators and domains offer a game or a brand, in which country, and since when. A court can only protect markets in which you can show what is happening. Where a game sits behind aggregators and white-label operators, that map rarely exists unless someone builds it.