Shanghai Huanqiu Lock Making Company sells padlocks in India under the registered mark Globe and says it has built up goodwill in that mark over many years as the prior user. A Chennai trader, Vikas Mandoth, began selling padlocks carrying what amounted to a Tamil transliteration of the word Globe, rendered so that it sounded and looked, to an ordinary buyer walking into a hardware shop, like the same brand written in a different script. Shanghai Huanqiu sued in the Commercial Division of the Madras High Court and got an ex parte interim injunction. Mandoth then applied to have that injunction vacated, arguing he had developed the mark independently and had his own history of use in the trade.
Justice K. Kumaresh Babu was not persuaded. On a prima facie reading of the rival claims to prior use, the Court found Shanghai Huanqiu more likely to be the senior user, and that was enough to keep the interim protection in place while the suit runs its course. The more interesting part of the order, and the part that outlets have led with, is what the Court said about using a vernacular script rather than the Roman alphabet to render someone else's mark. Mandoth's padlocks did not carry the word Globe in English. They carried a Tamil word that was simply the phonetic Tamil equivalent of it. His argument, in effect, was that a different script means a different mark.
The Court rejected that argument. Trademark law protects against confusion, and confusion is a question about how an ordinary purchaser perceives what they are buying, not about which alphabet a word happens to be printed in. A mark rendered in Tamil that sounds the same and carries the same meaning as the registered English mark, used on an identical class of goods sold in the same trade channels, creates exactly the deception the Trade Marks Act exists to prevent. Treating a transliterated or vernacular version of a mark as automatically outside the scope of infringement would hand infringers an easy workaround: keep the meaning and the sound, change only the script, and claim a clean slate. The Court was not willing to read the statute to permit that kind of evasion.
The order went further than the word mark itself. The Court also allowed Shanghai Huanqiu's parallel claim over the get-up of the packaging, restraining Mandoth from using artistic work, trade dress and colour combinations that mirrored the plaintiff's packaging, treating the overall look of the product as part of what needed protecting alongside the word mark. That is a reminder that in padlock and hardware disputes, where buyers often recognise a brand by its packaging colours before they read anything on it, the visual dress can carry as much evidentiary weight as the name.
Mandoth had raised other defences too, including an allegation that some of the plaintiff's supporting documents were fabricated and a challenge to the maintainability of the suit itself. The Court did not shut those arguments down permanently. It held they were matters for trial, where oral and documentary evidence could be tested properly, and declined to decide them at the interim stage on affidavits alone. The injunction made absolute now is therefore not the final word on infringement; it simply keeps Mandoth off the market with his Tamil Globe padlocks until the suit is actually heard and decided.
For brand owners operating in India's many regional-language retail markets, this order gives a useful, citable precedent for a problem that comes up often and is not always litigated cleanly: a competitor who copies a mark's sound and sense but swaps the script, betting that courts will treat script as decisive. The Madras High Court's answer is that they will not. What matters is what the mark communicates to the buyer standing in front of the shelf, in whichever language or script that buyer happens to read, and enforcement strategy should be built around that reality rather than around the alphabet printed on the packaging.