India: Trademark

The Delhi High Court has ruled on a trademark dispute involving the mark ALPHARD, examining whether transborder reputation and unsolicited imports of luxury vehicles into India can establish goodwill sufficient to qualify a mark as 'well-known' under Indian law. The case required the court to distinguish the Supreme Court's Prius decision and evaluate whether voluntary importation by third parties, without formal commercial launch, demonstrates actionable recognition within the relevant consumer segment.

Personality rights have become an increasingly important area of Indian intellectual property law in recent years.

Can a pharmaceutical giant's two-decade-old brand name ‘A TO Z' command exclusive rights over those three terms in the multivitamin market? And what happens when a smaller competitor enters with a composite mark containing the same alphabetical endpoints, embedded within an entirely different word?

Most people consider a trademark to be a logo, a brand name, or a slogan. However, intellectual property law has long recognised that the human senses extend well beyond sight and reading.

Can a brand use a competitor’s registered trademark (LOTUS) as part of a product name (Lotus Splash) by claiming it is simply describing the ingredients?

Cosplay, short for ‘costume play’, refers to people dressing up in costumes portraying characters of anime, manga, video games, films, or comic books. A hobby confined to conventions is now worth multi-billion dollars in terms of revenue being generated by way of selling the costumes, social media monetization, and cosplay contests during the conventions, and professionally performing the character impersonations.

Even though the global economy is stable, there are still many serious threats to Intellectual Property Protection Rights. Within the past few years, due to the growing popularity of e-commerce, cross-border trade and digital transactions in the Marketplace, India has become a target for counterfeit goods.

At first glance, a pair of hawaii slippers, the humble rubber flip-flop ubiquitous across Indian households, seems an unlikely protagonist in a high-stakes intellectual property dispute. Yet it is precisely in such ordinary, everyday objects that design law faces its most interesting test: can novelty truly reside in something as commonplace as a slipper?

In India, as in many other jurisdictions, the trade marks registration process has clearly been demarcated into specific stages, uniquely balancing the rights and interests of third-parties and the applicants.