Log in or register
Share on LinkedInShare on LinkedIn

ARTICLE · 07 JULY 2022

Can You Trademark Translations?

Photon legal
Explore more from Photon legal

India is a multi-lingual country with over 19,500 languages and dialects spoken across the nation.

IndiaIntellectual Property
Prayank Khandelwal
Prayank Khandelwal
Author LinkedIn connections

Introduction

India is a multi-lingual country with over 19,500 languages and dialects spoken across the nation. The Constitution of India recognised 22 official languages. In a country so rich in languages, it is natural for establishments to register their brand names or marks in their regional language or in the language familiar by their target market. An issue however arises when two businesses dealing with similar or identical goods or services have trademarks that are translations of the same word in different languages. For instance, a feud arose between Hindustan Unilever (HUL) and TG Balaji Chettiar 1 for their soaps with trademarks representing the sun. HUL had trademarked 'Sunlight' whereas Balaji Chettiar had trademarked the Tamil word 'Surian meaning sun. Since both marks essentially represented the sun, the Court held that use of 'Surian' was deceptively similar and was bound to create confusion amongst consumers.

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