Greenpeace India was campaigning against a port development it argued threatened olive ridley turtle nesting grounds. As part of that campaign it released a browser game in the style of Pac-Man, in which turtles were pursued by characters marked with the Tata device. Tata Sons went to the Delhi High Court seeking an injunction and substantial damages, framing the claim in defamation and trademark infringement.
The court's answer
In 2011 the court declined to grant an interim injunction. The reasoning drew a distinction that sits at the heart of trademark law and is easy to lose sight of when your logo is being used to mock you. There is a difference between using a mark to sell something and using a mark to talk about the person who owns it. Greenpeace was not trading in goods, was not competing for Tata's customers, and was not attempting to pass anything off as Tata's. It was criticising a company, and it used the mark to identify the subject of that criticism, which is what parody and commentary inherently require. A critic who cannot name the target cannot criticise.
The court also declined to restrain speech in advance. If Tata could establish defamation at trial, damages remained available as a remedy afterwards. Prior restraint on public criticism was a materially heavier thing to ask a court for, and the threshold was correspondingly higher.
The claim was neither frivolous nor obviously wrong in law. It was simply a fight that was difficult to win, and one where losing happened in public, in front of exactly the audience the campaign had been trying to reach.
The takeaways
Trademark rights protect against confusion in trade. They are not a general right to control how your name is discussed.
Parody, criticism and commentary occupy protected ground, and courts weigh freedom of expression heavily before restraining any of it.
Enforcement carries a reputational cost. Suing a campaign can hand it precisely the attention it was struggling to obtain.
The right question is not only whether you can bring a claim, but what winning would actually buy and what losing would cost.
Cases brought from irritation rather than from policy tend to be the ones that go badly.
The lesson for your business
Have an enforcement policy that sorts incoming problems into categories before anyone drafts anything. Commercial free-riding, where somebody is making money from your goodwill, you pursue consistently and without exception. Genuine consumer confusion you fix quickly, often with a letter. Criticism you dislike is usually a communications matter rather than a legal one, and treating it as legal converts a small story into a large one. The discipline of deciding the categories in advance is what stops a bad case from being filed in the heat of a difficult afternoon.
