PHONEPE PVT. LTD. Vs. RESILIENT INNOVATIONS PVT. LTD.

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is not the first occasion on which the rival parties have locked horns against each other before a court of law. The applicant / petitioner herein, relying upon its registered trademark 'PhonePe' and its variants, initiated a suit before the Delhi High Court, alleging that the defendant had infringed upon its registered trademarks by using the mark 'BharatPe'. The application for interim reliefs filed therein was dismissed, which was later confirmed by the Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, as result of withdrawal of appeal and the suit is pending.

(2.) Even before this Court, the plaintiff filed an earlier suit, bearing Commercial IP Suit (L) No.24136 of 2021, against the defendant for having used allegedly infringing trademark 'postpe'. The said suit was withdrawn on 22/10/2021, with conditional liberty granted by this Court. It was specifically recorded that the contentions of the defendant were kept open and that the defendant could also rely upon the plaint in the said suit, in order to oppose any fresh suit or interim application that may be filed by the plaintiff herein. The defendant raised a challenge before the Division Bench of this Court, which failed and a petition filed there against before the Supreme Court was also dismissed.

(3.) It is in this backdrop that the plaintiff filed the present suit and application for interim reliefs. The plaintiff adopted the trademark 'PhonePe' in the year 2014. It applied for registration of 'PhonePe' and its variants before the Registrar of Trademarks. There is no dispute about the fact that the plaintiff holds registration for the word mark 'PhonePe' and its variants including 'pe' written in Devanagari Hindi script. Such registrations date back to March 2016 and onwards. The plaintiff under the said registered trademarks provides financial services to its clients through mobile phone application, facilitating financial transactions amongst consumers and merchants on online and offline payment modes like Unified Payment Interface (UPI), QR Codes or through debit and credit cards. It is the case of the plaintiff that its services enable acceptance of payments for products and services through the PhonePe application. Due to the ease of using the said service provided by the plaintiff, soon after its launch, the PhonePe app of the plaintiff became immensely popular and by the time the suit was filed, there were more than 350 million registered users of the PhonePe app with a large market share.