This post was first published on 14th October, 2014.
As discussed in our earlier post, the Doctrine of Foreign Equivalents under the Trademarks Law requires the Trademark Office to translate foreign words to English in order to determine whether certain marks qualify for trademark registration or not. In this post, we are looking into whether the Indian Courts consider this doctrine an acceptable principle of the Trademark Law.
Indian Courts have not faced the question of applicability of this doctrine in many…
This post was first published on 10th October, 2014.
The Doctrine of Foreign Equivalents is a rule used in the Trademark Law which states that a foreign word and its equivalent English translation may be deemed confusingly similar. Under this doctrine, marks consisting of or including foreign words or terms from common, modern languages are translated into English to determine the extent to which it is generic, descriptive, the likelihood of confusion it may cause among other similar issues.
The Trademark Manual of…