Blog

July 13, 2020

Trademark: Descriptive or Generic, Distinctiveness Rules its Fate

The Supreme Court of United States (further referred as SCOTUS) in its June term resolved the longstanding issue of protecting generic domain names and trademarks. Over the past week, since the opinion was published on June 30th, the SCOTUS’s booking.com ruling has rocked the trademark world and has forced lawyers and practitioners to rethink the obvious question: “will my generic or descriptive trademark ever be protected? Will it ever receive that holy ® symbol?” The SCOTUS answers in affirmative. The...

Trademark

June 29, 2020

Public outcry makes TM Fair & Lovely Unfair: HUL to delete word FAIR from its brand

In the recent news, Hindustan Uniliver has taken a massive step towards rebranding of its popular ‘FAIR & LOVELY’ range by dropping the word FAIR from the same. Though the step is being seen in light of the recent global public outrage against racism due to death of George Floyd, the decision towards rebranding is not sudden as the Company also in the year 2019, stopped usage of words such as ‘fair/fairness’, white/whitening and removed before-and-after impressions and shade guides...

Trademark

June 22, 2020

Madras High Court reaffirms the law on generic and common trademarks

The Madras High Court settled a long-standing dispute between ITC and Nestle which involved their use of generic and laudatory words to describe their product line of instant noodles. The case was titled as Civil Suit 231 of 2013 and was filed by ITC in the High Court Madras. After an 8 year long battle the court held that the words “Magic Masala” are common to trade and laudatory and nobody can claim monopoly over the words. ITC alleged that...

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Trademark: Descriptive or Generic, Distinctiveness Rules its Fate

Public outcry makes TM Fair & Lovely Unfair: HUL to delete word FAIR from its brand

Madras High Court reaffirms the law on generic and common trademarks