Order preventing company from importing and selling Samsung printers and cartridges set aside by court following petition.
Law et al News reports that the Delhi High Court has set aside a judgement made in February against a company accused by Samsung Electronics of violating its trademark rights after a petition was filed by authorised dealer of Samsung products Kapil Wadhwa.
Samsung had claimed that the appellants were “purchasing from the foreign market, printers manufactured and sold by it under the trademark SAMSUNG/Samsung and after importing the same into India were selling the products in the Indian market”, thus infringing on Samsung’s registered trademark in the country. Samsung also alleged that the company offered the Samsung printers on their website at much lower prices than the OEM and that it used “deep hyper linking” to suggest that they were affiliated with Samsung.
In February it was held by a single judge bench that the rule of national exhaustion applied to the case under the Trademarks Act 1999 and granted an “interim injunction against parallel imports”.
While the injunction preventing the parallel imports has been lifted, it was held that “the appellants shall continue to remain injuncted from meta-tagging their website to that of the respondent’s”, and that “while effecting the sale of Samsung/SAMSUNG printers and ink cartridges/toners, the respondents shall prominently display in their showrooms that the product sold by them have been imported from abroad and that the respondents do not give any warranty qua the goods nor provide any after sales service and that the warranty and after sales service is provided by the appellants personally”.