Hindware wins case against Google, Delhi HC fines tech giant Rs 30 lakh for trademark infringement

In a ruling that could have far-reaching implications for digital advertising and trademark protection in India, the Delhi High Court has held that Google infringed Hindware's trademark rights by allowing rival companies to bid on the sanitaryware maker's registered trademark "HINDWARE" through its Google Ads platform.

Justice Mini Pushkarna permanently restrained Google from using "HINDWARE" and its variants as advertising keywords and directed the company to pay Rs 30 lakh in damages to the company.

At the heart of the dispute was Google's practice of allowing advertisers to purchase trademarks as keywords so that their sponsored links appear when consumers search for those terms. Hindware had alleged that competitors Grohe and Cera purchased the keyword "HINDWARE", resulting in their advertisements appearing before potential customers searching specifically for Hindware products.

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Rejecting Google's argument that keywords are merely invisible backend triggers and therefore do not constitute trademark use, the court held that trademark law extends beyond what is physically visible to consumers.

“Whenever someone searches for ‘Zerodha’, the traffic should rightfully come to Zerodha. But what often happens is that the first couple of results on Google Search are ads, leading the customer to a competitor's website. In the process, we lose business that should have come to us," Nithin Kamath said on X.

"It is not necessary that the registered trademark physically appears in an advertisement for the same to be used in advertising," the court observed, adding that the use of a trademark as a keyword to trigger advertisements amounts to use of the mark "in advertising" under the Trade Marks Act.

The court held that Google could not escape liability merely because the trademark was hidden from public view. Drawing parallels with meta-tags, Justice Pushkarna observed that diverting internet traffic through invisible technological tools could still amount to infringement if it exploits another company's goodwill.

A key factor in the judgment was the nature of the trademark itself. The court noted that "HINDWARE" is a coined and well-known mark with no dictionary meaning. Therefore, a consumer searching for "HINDWARE" is specifically looking for the plaintiff's products and not generic sanitaryware offerings. Allowing competitors to appear against such searches amounted to taking unfair advantage of the reputation built by the trademark owner.

The court further found that Google was effectively selling the "commercial pulling power" associated with the Hindware brand. By auctioning the trademark to competing advertisers and earning revenue every time consumers clicked on sponsored links, Google was commercially exploiting a trademark it neither owned nor was authorised to use.

Significantly, the judgment records that Google's advertising ecosystem actively facilitates such bidding through its keyword planning and suggestion tools. The court accepted Hindware's contention that Google encouraged advertisers to bid on competitor trademarks and monetised those searches through its pay-per-click model.

The court was equally critical of Google's defence under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, which provides safe-harbour protection to intermediaries.

Justice Pushkarna held that Google was not a passive intermediary merely hosting third-party content. Instead, it played an active role by operating the keyword auction system, determining advertisement placements, providing keyword suggestions and earning revenue from sponsored search results. Therefore, it could not claim immunity available to neutral platforms.

The judgment also notes that Google's policy effectively forces trademark owners to bid on their own trademarks to ensure visibility in search results. Such a system, the court indicated, enables Google to commercially benefit from intellectual property belonging to others while compelling trademark owners to pay for protection of their own brands.

Concluding that Google's conduct amounted to infringement, unfair advantage and dilution of a well-known trademark, the Delhi High Court ruled in favour of Hindware and awarded damages of Rs 30 lakh, marking one of the strongest judicial pronouncements in India against the use of trademarked terms as advertising keywords.