Sound Board

Our thoughts and views on the practice of Intellectual Property in India and around the world.

Celebrities influence us the deepest. Irrespective of our ‘literacy’, they help us ‘decide’ whether to buy a particular brand or not, through their appearances in advertisements. A celebrity endorsing a product or service, serves as a promise of quality and trust and strikes an instant credibility to the brand.To keep a check on this the Advertising Standards Council of India (hereinafter ‘ASCI’) released a set of guidelines in 2017 to ensure that the advertisements starring them are not…

Trademark holders can finally stop fretting over errors in their trademark registration certificates with the much-welcomed notice by the Indian Trademarks Office dated September 6, 2019.  After multiple requests from the Trademark Owners and trademark Counsels troubled with wrong details on the trademark registration certificates, the Trademark Office has gotten the ball rolling by affording an opportunity to make right the errors made by the Trademark Office on the  Registration Certificates…

Recently, a batch of seven suits for injunction were filed in the Delhi High Court by Amway, Modicare, Oriflame against 1MG, Amazon, Flipkart and few other E-commerce entities for injunction to restrain  direct sellers from selling  the Plaintiffs’ products on the E-commerce platforms without the former’s consent. .

The Intellectual Property Appellate Board recently held hearings for trademark matters in July 2019. The cause list was sent on a rather short notice, and came as a surprise to many advocates since the IPAB currently doesn’t have a technical member for trademarks, and therefore should not be hearing trademark matters under the law. We’ll be taking a look at this in closer detail in this post.

The Indian Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade issued a public notice on June 24, 2019, along with a draft guideline for comments from stakeholders (within 30 days) on the peppy tagline “Invaluable Treasure of Incredible India” and a common tri-color logo for GI certified products.

In a recent judgement, the Delhi High Court set a precedent by issuing India’s first-ever ‘dynamic injunction’ against websites who were deemed to be infringing upon the rights of copyright holders.

With the advancement of technology and the expansion of the grey-market, brands worldwide are currently facing a large-scale import and export of infringing/false & counterfeit goods. Accordingly, to stop the illegal import/export of the counterfeit goods and products into the Indian market, the government has taken strict steps and bought in new amendments in getting the IP registered with the Customs Authority.

Privacy (and particularly data privacy) has become a major talking point over the last few years. With the exponential growth in digitization of services and expanded surveillance capabilities (both government and the private sector), more and more citizens around the world have pushed for governments to legislate strong privacy controls.

The name Adidas is not new, and neither are its products. But in a major twist and what appears to be a blow, the European Court has ruled that the “three stripes” brand/trademark of Adidas was not distinctive enough.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most significant pieces of legislation in any sector that has been enacted in recent years. Since its enforcement in May 2018, the GDPR has already seen a critical transformation in the way that various organizations store, handle, and process user data. We’ve provided an overview of the GDPR and some of its key features in an earlier post, which can be seen here. In this post, we’ll be examining some of the key…