The Delhi High Court has held that Google’s practice of allowing trademarked brand names to be auctioned as advertising keywords in Google Ads amounts to trademark infringement, and it has permanently restrained the company from using “HINDWARE” or its variations as keywords on its ad platform. The court also directed Google to pay Rs 30 lakh in damages to Hindware, marking a significant ruling on the use of registered marks in online advertising.
The case began in 2013 when sanitaryware company Hindware discovered that competitors, including Cera Sanitaryware and its website developer Omkara Infoweb, were buying the trademark “HINDWARE” as a keyword through Google’s AdWords programme. In October 2014, Hindware found that Grohe had also purchased the term. As a result, searches for Hindware displayed competitor ads at the top of search results, which Hindware argued caused unfair competition, diverted customers and diluted its trademark.
While Cera and Grohe later settled with Hindware, the case against Google continued to determine whether the search engine could be held liable for enabling the practice. The central legal question was whether the use of a trademark as an invisible keyword trigger could still amount to “use in advertising” under the Trade Marks Act, 1999, and whether such use could create confusion among consumers.
Justice Mini Pushkarna ruled that a trademark does not need to appear physically in an advertisement to be considered used in advertising. The court said that using a trademark as a keyword to trigger ads for goods or services is itself a form of use in advertising. It relied on Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, which treats the application of a registered mark to advertising material without permission as infringement.
In a 163-page judgment, the court found that Google and its subsidiaries had actively infringed Hindware’s well-known and coined mark by allowing competitors to bid on it to capture internet traffic. The court observed that because “HINDWARE” has no dictionary meaning, a person searching for it is specifically looking for Hindware’s products. By making the brand name a biddable keyword, Google was said to be monetising the commercial value and goodwill attached to a mark it did not own.
The court also rejected Google’s argument that backend keywords are invisible to users and therefore do not amount to use of a trademark. It said advertising is a broad process and that invisible keywords are part of the mechanism that drives promotional activity. The court compared keyword bidding to meta-tags, saying that diverting traffic from a trademark owner’s website to a competitor’s site is unlawful even if the code is not visible to consumers.
Google’s attempt to claim safe-harbor protection under the Information Technology Act also failed. The court held that Google is not a passive intermediary in this context, but an active participant that decides which sponsored links are shown and earns revenue from the resulting clicks. It further noted that Google’s India policy does not investigate trademark use in keywords, which the court said showed a lack of due diligence.
The ruling is expected to influence how search advertising and trademark enforcement are treated in India’s digital marketplace.
