The court established that failure to respond to infringement claims leads to automatic admission of the plaintiff's allegations, justifying a decree without trial.

JUDGMENT :

AMIT BANSAL, J.

1. The present suit has been filed seeking relief of permanent injunction restraining the defendants from infringing the trademark and copyright of the plaintiff, passing off their goods as that of the plaintiff, along with other ancillary reliefs.

PLEADINGS IN THE PLAINT

2. The plaintiff is a portfolio company of Advent International, a global private equity firm, and is engaged in diverse business activities that encompasses manufacturing, marketing, and selling of home appliances such as water purifiers, vacuum cleaners, air purifiers, etc. under a number of distinctive trademarks.

3. The predecessor in title of the plaintiff is M/s. Samuel Osborn (India) Limited, which was incorporated in the year 1931. In the year 1982, the name of the company was changed to Eureka Forbes Limited and since then, the plaintiff’s business was extended to the field of water purification systems.

4. The plaintiff through its predecessor in title adopted the trademark ‘AQUAGUARD’/ in 1982 in respect of water purification systems that were premised on UV and Reverse Osmosis (“RO”) technology.

5. Apart from water purifiers, the plaintiff’s revenue is also generated from the sale of spares and consumables under the marks ‘AQUAGUARD’, ‘AQUAGUARD I FILTER’ and ‘AQUASFILTER’ which were specifically designed as per sediment filtration technology. To replace the aforesaid spares having the said technology, the plaintiff provides Annual Maintenance Contracts (AMC) to its customers after the warranty period of the water purifiers expires which is on a year-on-year basis.

6. The earliest registration of the mark ‘AQUAGUARD’ dates back to the year 1992 in India. The certificates of trademark registrations granted in favour of the plaintiff in respect of the marks ‘AQUAGUARD’, ‘AQUASFILTER’ and other ‘AQUA’ formative marks has been filed along with the plaint (pages 182-1017, 1093-1105 and 1127-1167 of the plaintiff’s documents filed with the plaint).

7. The plaintiff is also the proprietor of the artistic work in the

The plaintiff’s aforementioned artworks/labels are “original artistic work” within the meaning of Section 2(c) of the Copyright Act, 1957, and the plaintiff is the first owner of the copyright therein by virtue of Section 17 of the Copyright Act, 1957. The certificates of copyright registrations are filed as documents along with the plaint at pages 1018-1088 and 1106-1122. All the aforesaid trademark/copyright registrations remain valid and subsisting.

8. In over four decades, the plaintiff has grown its operations exponentially in the Indian market. The plaintiff operates in over 135 cities across India and has further expanded into 1515 towns and 400 smaller towns through its authorized channels, with 19,850 dealers all over the country.

9. The plaintiff has given its sales turnover and advertisement expenses for the period 1983-2022 supported by a CA Certificate, which shows that the sales turnover in respect of the products sold under the mark ‘AQUAGUARD’ of the plaintiff is quite substantial (filed as document along with the plaint at pages 133-134). For the financial year 2021-2022 alone, the sales figures are to the tune of Rs.276,84,99,000/- and the advertisement expenses amount to Rs.2,76,82,000/-.

10. In April-May 2023, the plaintiff began receiving complaints that certain spare parts and consumables (including but not limited to Water Filters, Candles, MLTs [Multi Layered Threaded Filters], Tubes, RO Membranes, Flow Restrictor, Connectors, Hooks, Copper/Zinc Infusion Cartridges) were being counterfeited by third party entities in the market.

11