Need for protection of Trademarks

A fake bottle of branded cough syrup looks exactly like the real one, sits on a chemist's shelf in Vashi and costs a little less. The buyer is cheated, the real manufacturer loses a customer, and a sick child may get the wrong medicine. Nothing has been stolen in the usual sense, yet every person in that chain is harmed. Why does the law step in to protect a label, and whom exactly is it protecting?

In two minutes

Trade mark law protects three interests at once: the trader's goodwill, the consumer's right not to be misled, and the fairness of the market; it does this through a registration-based right, the common-law action of passing off, and criminal penalties.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Intellectual Property Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.