Sun Pharma has sold its acid-reflux drug under the mark Pantocid since 1999, and it says it can prove continuous use with invoices going back that far. When Finecure Pharmaceuticals began selling Pantopacid, along with Pantopacid D and Pantopacid SR, Sun Pharma sued for trademark infringement, arguing that a patient reading a prescription or a chemist pulling a strip off the shelf could easily mix up two pantoprazole-based drugs with names this close.
The Single Judge, Justice C. Hari Shankar, did not see it that way back in 2023, and refused Sun Pharma interim relief. His reasons were not about the marks' similarity as such but about Sun Pharma's own conduct and the strength of its registration: he found a credible challenge to the validity of the Pantocid registration, pointed to what he regarded as suppression of material facts by Sun Pharma in presenting its case, and noted an unexplained delay before Sun Pharma moved the Court at all. On that combination, interim injunction was refused, notwithstanding a prima facie finding of infringement.
Sun Pharma appealed, and the Division Bench of Justice V. Kameswar Rao and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora set the Single Judge's order aside. Their central objection was not that the Single Judge got the facts wrong but that he approached the legal starting point incorrectly. Under Section 31(1) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, registration itself carries a presumption of prima facie validity; a defendant who wants to resist an injunction by attacking that validity has to do more than raise a credible doubt, because the statute puts its thumb on the scale in favour of the registered proprietor at the interim stage. The Bench held that the Single Judge had not properly given Sun Pharma's registration the benefit of that presumption before weighing it against the suppression and delay arguments.
Once the presumption was restored to its proper place, the balance shifted. The Bench restrained Finecure from manufacturing or selling any product under Pantopacid, Pantopacid D or Pantopacid SR, finding these names deceptively similar to the registered Pantocid mark closely enough to warrant interim protection pending full trial of the suit.
The order was not an unqualified win for Sun Pharma on every point, though. The Bench carved out a transitional allowance for Finecure, giving it four months to clear existing stock bearing the Pantopacid marks, subject to conditions the Court imposed, including a requirement that Finecure first file an affidavit listing its complete inventory of the affected products before a single additional strip could reach the market. That kind of sell-off window is a familiar device in Indian trademark practice, letting a restrained party wind down existing stock in an orderly and accountable way rather than face an immediate and total halt that could leave genuine, already-manufactured product stranded.
This reversal turns on a point that recurs often enough in pharmaceutical trademark litigation to be worth flagging on its own: courts weighing an interim injunction against a registered mark are not meant to treat a defendant's validity challenge and a plaintiff's registration as evenly matched from the outset. The statutory presumption means the defendant carries a real burden to displace that presumption, not merely to raise a plausible question about it, and a single judge who treats the two sides as starting from a neutral baseline risks exactly the kind of reversal Sun Pharma secured here.
For Finecure, the near-term consequence is a four-month countdown to clear its Pantopacid inventory under the Court's reporting conditions, with its ability to continue selling any new batch of product under that name foreclosed unless the full trial of the suit eventually goes its way. For other generic and branded pharmaceutical manufacturers watching from the sidelines, the ruling is a reminder that a credible-sounding validity challenge to a competitor's decades-old registration is not, by itself, enough to keep an infringement claim at bay once an appellate bench applies the presumption the statute actually requires.