Trademark Enforcement in India: Infringement, Passing Off and What Courts Now Require on Evidence and Delay

By Bhaskar Subramanian, Partner, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors and Subhradip Roy, Partner, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors and Souvik Bose, Associate, S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors

Published 24 October 2026 · Law stated as on 22 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer

Indian trademark litigation runs on two tracks at once, the statutory action for infringement and the common law action for passing off, and a brand owner who understands only one of them is working with half a toolkit. Recent rulings have reopened questions that practitioners thought settled: whether a mark must be formally declared well known before it gets broader protection, whether a civil court notified as a commercial court can even hear the suit, and how much a plaintiff's delay in approaching the court should count against it.

Two causes of action, one set of facts

A business whose brand has been copied in India nearly always has two legal routes open to it, and the two differ enough in their proof requirements that conflating them is a common and costly mistake. The first is the statutory action for infringement under Section 29 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, available only to the registered proprietor or a registered permitted user of a mark. The second is the common law action for passing off, preserved by Section 27(2) of the Act, which protects goodwill built up in a mark or get-up regardless of whether it is registered at all.

Section 29 infringement turns on a comparison between the registered mark and the defendant's mark as used in relation to the goods or services for which registration exists. Once the plaintiff shows that its mark is registered and that the defendant has used an identical or deceptively similar mark in the course of trade, the Act effectively presumes a likelihood of confusion for identical marks on identical goods under Section 29(1) and (2), and extends further protection to marks with a reputation in India under Section 29(4), which does not require the goods to be similar at all. The defendant's intent is not formally an ingredient of the statutory wrong, though courts routinely look at it when weighing interim relief.

Passing off demands more. The plaintiff must establish what English and Indian courts have long called the classical trinity: goodwill or reputation attached to the goods or services in the mind of the purchasing public, a misrepresentation by the defendant leading or likely to lead the public to believe that its goods are those of the plaintiff, and damage, actual or probable, to that goodwill. Holding a trademark registration is not a complete defence to a passing-off claim brought by a prior user of an unregistered or differently registered mark, a point reaffirmed in the Havells v. Havai line of reasoning that Indian courts continue to apply: registration gives a bundle of statutory rights, it does not extinguish someone else's accrued common law goodwill.

In practice, nearly every well-drafted plaint pleads both causes together, because the facts that prove one usually go a long way toward proving the other, and a plaintiff who fails on a technical registration point, perhaps because its mark was not yet registered for the relevant class of goods when the infringement began, can still succeed on passing off provided it proves prior use and reputation. The pleading strategy matters because the reliefs, standard of proof and even the forum can diverge once the matter goes beyond the interim stage.

The statutory architecture: what Sections 28, 29 and 134 actually do

Section 28 of the Trade Marks Act gives the registered proprietor the exclusive right to use the mark in relation to the goods or services for which it is registered, and the right to seek relief for infringement in the manner provided by the Act. Section 29 then defines infringement across several scenarios, running from the straightforward case of an identical mark on identical goods to more contestable territory: use of a mark identical or similar to a registered mark in relation to dissimilar goods or services, where the registered mark has a reputation in India and the use without due cause takes unfair advantage of, or is detrimental to, the distinctive character or repute of the registered mark.

Where a trademark suit can even be filed is governed by Section 134. It gives the plaintiff the option to sue in a District Court having jurisdiction, in addition to any court that would otherwise have jurisdiction under the Code of Civil Procedure, and it has been read for decades as fixing a floor: a trademark infringement or passing-off suit cannot be tried by any court inferior to a District Court, regardless of how small the pecuniary value of the claim might otherwise permit. Section 135 sets out the available reliefs: injunction, and at the plaintiff's option either damages or an account of profits, together with delivery up of the infringing labels and marks for destruction.

The Commercial Courts Act, 2015 complicates this picture by routing most trademark suits, which qualify as 'commercial disputes' under Section 2(1)(c)(xvii) of that Act once they involve intellectual property rights, into Commercial Courts or Commercial Divisions rather than ordinary civil courts. Several states have notified civil courts below the district level, generally Civil Judges (Senior Division), as Commercial Courts for this purpose under Section 3 of the Commercial Courts Act. That notification sits awkwardly against the Section 134 floor, and the tension between the two has now produced a live jurisdictional dispute taken up later in this piece.

For a brand with a substantial Indian footprint, the first practical question is not whether infringement has occurred but where to sue. The Delhi High Court's specialised Intellectual Property Division, created under its 2022 IPD Rules, has become the preferred forum for high-value trademark and patent litigation because of its case-management timelines and judges with IP experience, and many claimants with a connection to Delhi, whether through a registered office, a branch, or the location of the infringing sale, structure their pleadings to invoke that jurisdiction deliberately.

Well-known marks after Ghostbusters and Zara v. Zora

Section 11(2) of the Trade Marks Act bars registration of a mark that is identical or similar to an earlier trademark which is well known in India, even where the goods or services are not similar, provided the use of the later mark would take unfair advantage of, or be detrimental to, the distinctive character or repute of the earlier mark. For years, a recurring question was whether a brand owner had to first obtain a formal declaration that its mark was 'well known', through the process under Rule 124 of the Trade Marks Rules, 2017, before it could invoke this cross-class protection in opposition or infringement proceedings against someone else.

The Delhi High Court resolved that question in 2026 in Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Registrar of Trade Marks, arising out of Columbia's opposition to a 'GHOST BUSTER' mark filed for Class 5 goods. The Registrar had rejected the opposition on the footing that Columbia's GHOSTBUSTERS registrations covered only Classes 9, 25, 28 and 41, and that it had not shown use or registration for Class 5. Justice Jyoti Singh held that there is no statutory requirement under Section 11(2) that the proprietor of an earlier mark must first secure a Rule 124 declaration of well-known status, and that the Registrar retains the power to determine well-known status for itself during opposition proceedings. The matter went back to the Registrar for fresh consideration of both the well-known claim and an allegation of bad-faith adoption.

A similar question, applied with sharper teeth, decided Zara v. Zora a few months later. Inditex, the owner of ZARA, had opposed a competing ZORA registration in Class 24 for fabrics, a class well removed from ZARA's core apparel registrations. The Registrar had rejected the opposition by comparing the two marks letter by letter and finding them sufficiently distinct. The Delhi High Court, again per Justice Jyoti Singh, set that order aside. It held that ZARA qualified for well-known protection under Section 11(2) without any prior formal declaration, that the Registrar had erred by dissecting the marks rather than comparing them as a whole, and it directed ZORA's removal from the register within two months. The anti-dissection principle the Court applied, comparing marks for their overall impression on an unwary consumer rather than analysing them feature by feature, is now the operative standard for assessing deceptive similarity across registration and infringement proceedings alike.

Read together, these rulings widen the practical reach of well-known mark protection considerably. A brand owner no longer needs to have gone through the Rule 124 process, which requires documentary proof of the extent of knowledge of the mark among the relevant public, the duration and geographical area of use, and evidence of successful enforcement, before it can resist a dissimilar-goods registration on well-known grounds. That said, the underlying evidentiary burden has not disappeared; it has simply moved from a separate administrative step to being argued directly within the opposition or infringement proceeding itself, which means the same volume of use, advertising and recognition evidence still has to be marshalled, just inside a single forum rather than two.

Trans-border reputation: from Whirlpool to the Alphard reversal

A separate but related doctrine governs marks that have reputation abroad but no commercial presence in India. The foundational case is N.R. Dongre v. Whirlpool Corporation, where the Supreme Court held that a mark could enjoy protectable reputation and goodwill in India even without any sale of the product here, provided evidence showed that Indian consumers associated the mark with the foreign proprietor through international publications, travel and cross-border awareness. For years this trans-border reputation doctrine gave foreign brand owners a route to stop local adoption of their marks even before they had formally entered the Indian market.

The Supreme Court narrowed that route substantially in Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha v. Prius Auto Industries in 2017. Toyota had used PRIUS abroad since 1997 but did not use it in India until 2010, after the respondents had already registered and used the mark here since 2001. The Court held that mere global reputation does not automatically translate into Indian reputation; a plaintiff relying on trans-border reputation must independently prove that the mark had, in fact, crossed over into the awareness of a significant section of the Indian public before the defendant's adoption. The decision was read, and criticised by some commentators, as tilting Indian trademark law from a 'universality' approach toward territoriality, making trans-border reputation claims considerably harder to sustain on thin evidence.

A sharper recent gloss on this line comes from the Delhi High Court's 2026 Division Bench ruling in Toyota's own ALPHARD dispute, reversing an earlier single-judge order that had denied Toyota any benefit from the Prius doctrine. The single judge had held, consistently with Prius, that Toyota had never sold the ALPHARD model in India and that unauthorised third-party imports could not amount to use by the proprietor itself. The Division Bench took a different view of the same facts: unsolicited grey-market imports by Indian buyers, extensive online listings and sustained press coverage of the ALPHARD since 2008 were, taken together, sufficient to establish prior adoption, spillover goodwill and well-known status in India, even without Toyota ever having sold the vehicle here. Commentary on the ruling has flagged real tension with the general territoriality thrust of Prius, suggesting that in niche or luxury segments, where brand awareness among a small but informed consumer base can be as commercially significant as mass sales penetration, courts may be willing to find Indian reputation on a thinner evidentiary record than Prius would otherwise demand. Whether this becomes a settled exception for niche markets or is confined to its own facts is not yet clear, and brand owners relying on it should treat it as persuasive rather than as a safe new general rule.

Comparing marks: dominant features, house marks and script

Once a court moves past the question of standing to sue and into the comparison of marks, the operative test asks whether the rival mark is likely to deceive or cause confusion among persons of average intelligence and imperfect recollection, judging the marks as wholes rather than isolating individual letters or syllables. Three recent Delhi High Court rulings illustrate how that test is actually applied, and each cuts against a defence that looked plausible on paper.

In the long-running Flipkart MARQ dispute, Flipkart argued that its private-label electronics mark MarQ was visually and structurally different from Marc Enterprises' registered MARC mark, used since 1981. The Delhi High Court, upholding the trial court's interim injunction in an order dated 10 April 2026, held that where the dominant elements of two marks sound and look alike, pairing the junior mark with a well-known house mark, here, the Flipkart name, does not supply a meaningful point of distinction for the ordinary consumer. A Supreme Court special leave petition against the order was dismissed, with Flipkart permitted only a limited window to exhaust existing stock, and the underlying suit remains to be finally adjudicated on evidence, with all appellate findings treated as prima facie. Commentary following the ruling has pointed out that Indian law still has no settled, generally applicable doctrine for exactly how much weight a house mark should carry against an otherwise confusing product mark, so each case continues to be decided closely on its own facts.

The pharmaceutical dispute between Sun Pharma's PANTOCID and Finecure's PANTOPACID marks shows how a presumption of validity can decide an interim appeal even where the single judge had already found the marks confusingly similar but still refused an injunction. A Division Bench, in an order dated 1 July 2026, held that the single judge had not given adequate weight to the statutory presumption of prima facie validity attaching to a registered mark under Section 31(1), and that Finecure, having never cross-appealed the finding of similarity, could not resist an injunction built on the finding it did not challenge. The Bench restrained Finecure from using PANTOPACID, PANTOPACID D and PANTOPACID SR, permitting it four months to clear existing stock, while leaving disputed questions about the authenticity of certain invoices to be resolved at trial.

A third, less expected variant came from the Madras High Court in September 2026, in a dispute over the GLOBE lock mark. The defendant had adopted and registered a Tamil-script device rendering of 'Globe' and argued that a vernacular transliteration could not infringe a Roman-script registered mark. The Court made its earlier ex parte injunction absolute, holding that a mark rendered in a different script still infringes if it is phonetically and visually similar enough to confuse consumers, and that the defendant's own 2023 trademark application, filed on a 'proposed to be used' basis, undercut any claim of long, continuous prior use. The ruling also allowed a parallel claim over copying of artwork and trade dress to proceed alongside the trademark claim, confirming that packaging and get-up disputes are not displaced simply because a trademark cause of action is also pleaded on the same facts.

New terrain: keyword advertising as infringement

Online infringement has forced Indian courts to extend conventional tests to conduct that has no physical counterfeit at all. The clearest recent example is the Hindware dispute against Google, where Justice Mini Pushkarna of the Delhi High Court held Google liable for trademark infringement over its AdWords practice of allowing competitors, including Cera and Grohe, to bid on and use 'Hindware' and 'Hindware Sanitaryware' as paid search keywords, diverting searches for Hindware's products to rival advertisements. The Court rejected Google's defence that it was merely a neutral intermediary under the Information Technology Act, reasoning that selling a competitor the right to trigger an advertisement off a brand's registered mark amounted to use of that mark in the course of trade, and awarded nominal damages of ₹30 lakh jointly against Google LLC and Google India.

The ruling sits in some tension with the Delhi High Court's own earlier Division Bench decisions in the DRS Logistics and Google v. MakeMyTrip line of cases, which had held that the mere purchase of a trademark as a keyword does not, by itself, constitute infringement unless there is also a likelihood of actual consumer confusion, for instance where the resulting advertisement itself displays or implies the brand's name. Google has appealed the Hindware decision to a Division Bench, arguing that the single-judge order contains no finding that any consumer was actually confused, a point that goes to the heart of whether the earlier precedent has been correctly distinguished or effectively overridden. The appeal remains pending, and brand owners should treat the keyword-advertising question as genuinely unsettled until the Division Bench rules: a single-judge finding of liability, even one as emphatic as this, has not yet been tested on appeal against directly contrary earlier Division Bench authority from the same court.

Getting an urgent interim injunction: the procedure and the test

Most trademark disputes are won or lost at the interim stage, because a defendant facing an injunction that could last years until trial has every incentive to settle, rebrand or abandon the disputed mark long before final judgment. The governing test, laid down by the Supreme Court in Wander Ltd. v. Antox India, requires a plaintiff seeking an interim injunction under Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2 of the Code of Civil Procedure to establish three things: a prima facie case, that the balance of convenience favours the grant of an injunction, and that it would suffer irreparable injury, not compensable in damages, if the injunction is refused and the dispute is later decided in its favour at trial.

The Supreme Court's decision in Midas Hygiene Industries v. Sudhir Bhatia adds a rule that specifically favours trademark and copyright plaintiffs: where infringement is established, an injunction must normally follow, and mere delay in approaching the court is not by itself sufficient ground to refuse one, particularly where the defendant's adoption of the mark appears dishonest. This is not a licence for indefinite inaction. Courts continue to treat substantial, unexplained delay as a factor cutting against the plaintiff where the case for dishonesty is thin or where the defendant has built up independent goodwill in the interval, and a plaintiff who sits on a known infringement for years before suing should expect the court to ask hard questions about why, even if delay alone will rarely be fatal once dishonest copying is shown.

A practical step most plaintiffs now have to clear before they even file is Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, which makes pre-institution mediation mandatory for commercial disputes, trademark suits among them, unless the suit contemplates urgent interim relief. The Supreme Court's 2023 ruling in Yamini Manohar v. T.K.D. Keerthi held that this exemption is not a plaintiff's unilateral right to invoke by merely asking for interim relief in the prayer clause; the court itself must be satisfied, from the plaint, the supporting documents and the facts pleaded, that the case genuinely needs urgent relief before it will excuse the plaintiff from mediation. Delhi High Court decisions in IP matters have tended to read this exemption generously given the public interest in curbing consumer confusion and counterfeit goods, but that approach sits uneasily with the stricter judicial-satisfaction standard Yamini Manohar demands, and the point has not been authoritatively reconciled. A plaintiff whose interim relief prayer looks like a drafting formality rather than a genuine emergency risks having its suit returned for mediation at the threshold, losing valuable time against an ongoing infringement.

Once the suit clears that threshold and an application for interim relief is moved, the usual sequence is: an ex parte ad interim injunction, if the court is satisfied the case is urgent enough that notice to the defendant would defeat the relief sought; appointment of a local commissioner under Order XXVI Rule 9 CPC to visit the defendant's premises, seize infringing stock, packaging material and account books, and prepare an inventory; service of notice and a contested hearing on whether the ad interim order should be confirmed; and, if confirmed, the injunction continuing until the suit is finally decided, subject to appeal under Order XLIII Rule 1(r) CPC or, in states that have adopted the Commercial Courts regime, under Section 13 of that Act, which in Delhi takes the form of an appeal under Section 37 read with the Act before a Division Bench of the High Court, as happened in both the Flipkart and Sun Pharma matters discussed above.

John Doe orders against unidentified counterfeiters

Counterfeiting operations are frequently run by networks of small, interchangeable sellers whose identities a brand owner cannot establish before filing suit, a market or a festival season being over by the time any one infringer is traced and served. Indian courts solved this with what is called, following the English practice, a John Doe order, though Indian pleadings substitute the name 'Ashok Kumar' for unidentified defendants. The practice traces to the Delhi High Court's 2002 order in Taj Television v. Rajan Mandal, where the court restrained an unquantified and unidentified set of cable operators from illegally retransmitting the 2002 FIFA World Cup broadcast, reasoning that it could not realistically identify every unlicensed operator in advance of relief that had to be granted before the tournament ended.

The same logic now routinely protects trademark and copyright owners against counterfeit goods and pirated content, exemplified by rulings such as Luxottica Group v. Ashok Kumar, restraining unidentified manufacturers and sellers of counterfeit eyewear bearing the RAY-BAN mark. A plaintiff seeking such an order typically has to show an established pattern of infringement by a class of unidentified persons, often supported by prior enforcement history or investigator affidavits describing specific instances of counterfeit sale, and the resulting order is usually coupled with a local commissioner's mandate to seize goods at identified premises, markets or online storefronts once particular infringers are later identified during execution. Because the order binds persons who were never named or served, courts expect plaintiffs to return promptly to convert the general injunction into specific relief against each infringer actually caught, and an order obtained on a thin factual showing, or renewed indefinitely without fresh evidence of ongoing infringement, risks being vacated as overbroad.

Evidence, jurisdiction and the questions courts are still answering

Trademark suits are decided on evidence of use, not assertion, and two 2026 rulings show how far courts will go to let that evidence actually be tested. In Shabu KN Achary v. Dharampal Premchand Limited, decided by the Supreme Court on 7 August 2026, the defendant in a trade dress and trademark suit sought to cross-examine the plaintiff on precisely when it had first used the BABA mark, a question the High Court below had disallowed because the defendant's own written statement was not formally on record. The Supreme Court set that order aside, holding that because the plaintiff's own injunction affidavit had itself raised the question of since when the mark had been used, the defendant was entitled to cross-examine on that very point regardless of whether its written statement was on record, and it directed the trial court to recall the plaintiff's witness to answer the question. The Court was careful to note that this does not give a defendant an unrestricted licence to introduce an entirely new defence through cross-examination alone; the question has to arise from material the plaintiff has itself put before the court.

The second development concerns the more fundamental question of which court may hear a trademark suit at all, and it remains genuinely open. Several states have notified Civil Judges, often at the Senior Division level, as Commercial Courts under Section 3 of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, to handle commercial disputes including intellectual property matters below the pecuniary thresholds reserved for Commercial Divisions of the High Courts. Section 134 of the Trade Marks Act, however, has long been read as fixing the District Court as the lowest court competent to try a trademark suit, a reading the Kerala High Court reaffirmed as recently as 8 September 2026 in Cutis International Cosmetics Clinic Ltd v. Cutis Institute of Medicine and Surgery, holding that the words 'having jurisdiction' in Section 134 do not mean 'having pecuniary jurisdiction', and that a suit cannot be filed in the District Court as a formality and then transferred down to a lower court once its modest pecuniary value becomes apparent.

That reading now directly conflicts with the practical effect of Commercial Courts notifications in several states, which route trademark suits below the Commercial Division threshold to notified Civil Judges who may sit well below District Court rank. The Supreme Court confronted this conflict squarely in I.S.D.S. Private Limited v. M/s Khemka Food Products Pvt. Ltd., arising from a Jamshedpur trademark suit over the 'Grihasti Bhog' mark that the trial court had returned for want of jurisdiction and the Jharkhand High Court had ordered restored. On 21 September 2026, the Supreme Court found a conflict between its own earlier decisions in Kandla Export and Jaycee Housing on this very point, granted leave, and referred the question to a larger bench to be constituted by the Chief Justice of India, pending which the underlying commercial suit remains stayed. Until that larger bench rules, the safe course for any plaintiff is to file in the District Court itself wherever the suit's value permits, resisting any suggestion that a notified Commercial Court below that rank can validly try the matter, since a judgment obtained from a court whose jurisdiction is later held invalid is a wasted exercise.

Limitation adds a further layer of complexity that is frequently mishandled. Trademark infringement is treated, following the Supreme Court's reasoning in Bengal Waterproof Manufacturing Co. v. Bombay Waterproof Manufacturing Co., as a recurring or continuing wrong: each fresh act of dealing in infringing goods generates its own cause of action, so a plaintiff is not permanently barred merely because the first infringing sale occurred more than three years before suit, though damages recoverable for sales outside the limitation window may still be constrained. Courts have, however, declined to extend this continuing-wrong logic without limit, for instance refusing to treat a rectification application as a perpetually renewing cause of action, so the doctrine should be pleaded with the specific, repeated infringing acts identified rather than invoked as a blanket proposition.

A compliance and enforcement checklist for brand owners

Enforcement strength is built well before any infringement is detected, and the businesses that fare best in Indian trademark litigation are generally the ones that treated registration and record-keeping as a continuing discipline rather than a one-time filing exercise. A sound programme keeps dated, indexed proof of first use in India, invoices, advertising spends, distribution agreements and packaging specimens going back as far as the mark's Indian history permits, because both the Section 11(2) well-known marks analysis and any trans-border reputation argument under the Whirlpool and Prius line of cases live or die on exactly this kind of evidence, assembled contemporaneously rather than reconstructed after a dispute arises.

Registration strategy should track the business's actual and reasonably anticipated expansion, since cross-class protection, even after Ghostbusters and Zara v. Zora loosened the formal precondition of a Rule 124 declaration, still requires the underlying proof of reputation to be built up and documented, and a registration portfolio limited to a narrow original class leaves real gaps that opportunistic filers in adjacent classes will exploit, as the Avon Agro dispute over Parle's '20-20' mark illustrates: a junior applicant's earlier filing date defeated the senior user's later but more extensive commercial use, because both parties had filed on a 'proposed to be used' basis and the court held that subsequent use cannot leapfrog an earlier filing date in that scenario. Filing promptly in every class where the brand might plausibly expand, rather than waiting until commercial use actually begins, closes that particular gap.

Watch services that monitor the trademark register, online marketplaces and, increasingly, paid search advertising, should feed into a documented escalation path: a dated cease-and-desist letter as the first step, preserving evidence of the infringing use as it exists at that moment since defendants frequently rebrand or delete listings the moment they are challenged, followed by a decision, made promptly rather than left to drift, on whether circumstances justify an ex parte interim injunction application, a local commissioner's visit, or a John Doe order where the infringers cannot yet be identified. Given the Midas Hygiene position that delay is not fatal but remains a real factor against marginal cases, and given that pre-institution mediation under Section 12A can be bypassed only where genuine urgency is shown, a business that waits months after discovering clear infringement before consulting counsel measurably weakens its own interim relief prospects, independent of the underlying merits of its claim.

What remains unsettled

Several of the questions this piece has traced are live rather than closed, and brand owners should plan around that uncertainty rather than assume any of them is settled law. The forum question is the most consequential: until the Supreme Court's larger bench decides the conflict between Kandla Export and Jaycee Housing in the Khemka Food Products reference, it remains genuinely unclear whether a Commercial Court notified below District Court rank can validly try a trademark suit in states that have made such notifications, and litigants in those states face a real risk of jurisdictional challenges derailing cases years into trial.

The keyword-advertising question is equally open. The Hindware ruling against Google sits in tension with the Division Bench's own earlier, more intermediary-friendly reasoning in the DRS Logistics and MakeMyTrip cases, and Google's pending appeal means the current position, that selling a brand's mark as an AdWords keyword can itself constitute infringement without separate proof of actual consumer confusion, cannot yet be treated as the settled law of the Delhi High Court, let alone of India generally.

A separate gap concerns the house-mark doctrine applied in the Flipkart MARQ dispute, that pairing a confusingly similar product mark with a well-known corporate house mark does not cure the confusion, is sound as applied to those facts but has not yet been generalised into a clear standard for when, if ever, a house mark can save an otherwise objectionable product mark; each case continues to be argued and decided on its own evidence. And the extent to which the 2026 ALPHARD ruling's relaxed approach to trans-border reputation in niche or luxury markets will be followed outside its own facts, given the more demanding territoriality standard the Supreme Court set in Prius, is not yet clear either. None of this should discourage enforcement action; it should simply inform how a litigant frames its pleadings and manages the risk of an adverse or inconsistent ruling on points the appellate courts have not finally closed.

Indian trademark enforcement in 2026 rewards a plaintiff who treats infringement and passing off as complementary claims, documents its use and reputation continuously rather than reactively, and moves quickly once infringement is detected. The well-known marks doctrine has become considerably more accessible after the Ghostbusters and Zara v. Zora rulings freed brand owners from the formal Rule 124 precondition, and the courts' comparison of marks continues to favour substance over superficial points of difference, whether the difference is a house mark, a script change, or a dissected letter-by-letter reading that the anti-dissection principle no longer tolerates.

At the same time, the procedural terrain carries real traps for the unwary: a suit filed in the wrong forum, a pre-institution mediation step skipped without a genuine basis for urgency, or delay left unexplained can each cost a plaintiff relief regardless of how strong its substantive case looks. The pending larger-bench reference on jurisdiction and the unresolved keyword-advertising appeal mean that careful forum selection and conservative procedural choices will matter more over the next year or two than they have in some time, and litigants who build in that caution now will be better placed whichever way those open questions are eventually resolved.

Frequently Asked Questions

References & Further Reading

The provisions, rulings and official documents below were relied on for this article, which states the law as on 22 October 2026. The position can change with amendments, rules and later decisions, so check the current text before acting on any of it.

1. Trade Marks Act, 1999, Sections 27, 28, 29, 31, 134, 135
2. Trade Marks Rules, 2017, Rule 124 (well-known trademark declaration)
3. Commercial Courts Act, 2015, Sections 2(1)(c)(xvii), 3, 12A, 13
4. Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2; Order XXVI Rule 9; Order XLIII Rule 1(r)
5. Delhi High Court Intellectual Property Division Rules, 2022
6. Wander Ltd. v. Antox India P. Ltd., 1990 (Supp) SCC 727
7. Midas Hygiene Industries (P) Ltd. v. Sudhir Bhatia, (2004) 3 SCC 90
8. N.R. Dongre v. Whirlpool Corporation, 1996 Supp (5) SCR 369
9. Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha v. Prius Auto Industries Ltd., Civil Appeal Nos. 5375-5377 of 2017 (decided 14 December 2017)
10. Bengal Waterproof Manufacturing Co. v. Bombay Waterproof Manufacturing Co., 1997 PTC 98 (SC)
11. Yamini Manohar v. T.K.D. Keerthi, (2024) 5 SCC 815
12. Taj Television Ltd. v. Rajan Mandal, 2003 (27) PTC 392 (Del)
13. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Registrar of Trade Marks, Delhi High Court, 2026 (well-known marks, Section 11(2))
14. Zara (Inditex, S.A.) v. Registrar of Trade Marks (ZORA cancellation), Delhi High Court, order dated July 2026
15. Flipkart India Pvt. Ltd. v. Marc Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., FAO(IPD) 46/2021, Delhi High Court, order dated 10 April 2026
16. Sun Pharma Laboratories Ltd. v. Finecure Pharmaceuticals Ltd. & Ors., Delhi High Court Division Bench, order dated 1 July 2026
17. Shanghai Huanqiu Lock Making Co. v. Vikas Mandoth, Madras High Court, order dated 7 September 2026
18. Google LLC v. Hindware Ltd. (keyword advertising dispute), Delhi High Court, single-judge order and pending Division Bench appeal, 2026
19. Toyota Jidosha Kabushiki Kaisha v. Tech Square (ALPHARD trans-border reputation), Delhi High Court Division Bench, 2026
20. Avon Agro Products Ltd. v. Parle Products Pvt. Ltd. ('20-20' priority dispute), Delhi High Court, 2026
21. Shabu KN Achary v. Dharampal Premchand Limited, 2026 INSC 819
22. Cutis International Cosmetics Clinic Ltd. v. Cutis Institute of Medicine and Surgery Pvt. Ltd., Kerala High Court, CRP 284 of 2025, order dated 8 September 2026
23. I.S.D.S. Private Limited & Anr. v. M/s Khemka Food Products Pvt. Ltd. & Anr., Supreme Court of India, order dated 21 September 2026 (reference to larger bench)

Related reading on this site

• Trademark infringement vs passing off guide
• Trademark infringement interim injunction guide
• Well known trademark rule 124 guide
• Anti counterfeiting john doe orders guide
• Parallel imports grey market goods trademark guide
• Columbia pictures ghostbusters registrar trademarks well known cross class
• Zara zora inditex trademark well known cancellation
• Delhi hc marq marc flipkart trademark injunction
• Delhi hc sun pharma finecure pantopacid pantocid trademark
• Madras hc tamil globe mark trademark infringement vikas mandoth
• Delhi hc google hindware trademark keyword ads
• Toyota alphard tech square transborder reputation
• Cutis international kerala hc trademark jurisdiction
• Isds khemka food products trademark jurisdiction commercial courts larger bench
• Shabu achary dharampal premchand sc cross examination
• Parle products registrar trademarks 20 20 priority