Log in or register
Share on LinkedInShare on LinkedIn

ARTICLE · 13 MAY 2025

Beyond Identical: How Indian Courts View Likelihood Of Confusion With House And Secondary Marks

Obhan Mason
Explore more from Obhan Mason

Adopting a secondary mark alongside a house mark is not always straightforward. Indian Courts weigh in on the likelihood of confusion in such cases, providing insights into trademark strategy and brand identity.

IndiaIntellectual Property
Essenese Obhan
Essenese Obhan
Nandini Chowdhry
Nandini Chowdhry
Author LinkedIn connections

Summary: Adopting a secondary mark alongside a house mark is not always straightforward. Indian Courts weigh in on the likelihood of confusion in such cases, providing insights into trademark strategy and brand identity.

As businesses expand product lines into adjacent markets, they often rely on brand extension strategies. This involves pairing well-known house marks with new sub-brands, model names, also known as 'secondary marks'. However, this tactic may not always work, as merely because secondary marks are used alongside house marks, consumer confusion is not always abated.

In this context, two Delhi High Court decisions — Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals Ltd. v. V-Guard Industries Ltd. 2024 SCC OnLine Del 1838 and Gensol Electric Vehicles v. Mahindra Last Mile Mobility 2025 SCC OnLine Del 68 — offer interesting, if divergent, perspectives. In Crompton, the Division Bench affirmed that the house mark "Crompton" along with "Pebble" constituted

We operate a free-to-view policy, asking only that you register in order to read all of our content. Please login or register to view the rest of this article.

Register for freeORLog in

View source

Related Articles

Legal Intelligence Newsletters: sign up for the latest legal and regulatory news on your chosen topics

Read more about

Related Comparative Guides

See more popular content from

Article

Copy, Right? ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC

When an artificial intelligence system is trained on copyrighted news content, and later answers a user’s question using what it learned, has the law been broken? On 24th July 2026, the Delhi High Court answered that question, at least for now. In ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC, Justice Amit Bansal declined to grant an interim injunction against OpenAI, holding, on a prima facie, interim stage view, that the company’s use of ANI’s news content to train its large language models (“LLMs”) falls within the fair dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957
IndiaIntellectual Property
S.S. Rana & Co.
S.S. Rana & Co.
Article

AI Training Data, Copyright Risk And Commercial Liability: What Businesses Need To Know

On 8 October 2026, USA Today Co. and its affiliated newspaper companies, which publish 19 titles including USA Today, the Detroit Free Press and The Arizona Republic, sued seven OpenAI entities in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges that OpenAI copied their journalism to train its models, stripped identifying information from it, and now uses those models to give ChatGPT users summaries that substitute for the original reporting. The publishers seek more than USD 250 million in damages, an injunction and an order for the destruction of models and training sets containing their content.
IndiaIntellectual Property
Legitpro Law
Legitpro Law