Delhi High Court Refuses to Stay Google's Trademark Infringement Ruling

New Delhi: The division bench of the Delhi High Court on Friday refused to stay its single-judge judgment in a trademark infringement case that held US-headquartered technology firm Google liable for allowing advertisers to bid on sanitaryware manufacturer Hindware's registered trademark as a keyword on its platform.

However, the division bench of justices V Kameswar Rao and Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora sought response from Hindware on an appeal by Google and Google India, which according to the single judge, had infringed other companies' trademark, including sanitaryware firms', through its Google Ads programme.

The division bench, while listing Google's appeal for final disposal on July 24, orally observed that display of websites of other companies on searching Hindware in Google search engine appeared to be creating confusion. Justice Mini Pushkarna, in her May judgement, had observed that Google can't be permitted to shrug off responsibility by making available a tool that leads to infringement, and then claim that the tool was not mandatory. The practice constituted a trademark infringement, the order said while permanently restraining tech firm from using Hindware or its variations as keywords in programme. The court imposed a ₹30 lakh fine on Google.

Senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for Google, argued that no court globally had held mere use of a trademark as a keyword to be trademark infringement.

Stating that Google's keyword advertising policy was being uniformly followed across jurisdictions, he argued that in 14 countries, not a single one has held that use of keywords for advertising is trademark infringement. When a company uses someone's trade name as a trigger, and there is no confusion, there can't be any "per se infringement", said Singhvi.