In 2024, Lenskart.com got SUED by Titan Company Limited for a “mistake” 1000s of marketers quietly make every day and we don’t even notice 🚨
According to the High Court of Delhi order in Titan Company Limited v. Lenskart Solutions Pvt Ltd,
Lenskart was using Titan’s trademarks like “Titan”, “Titan Eye+”, and “Fastrack” inside its HTML meta tags.These tags are invisible to you and me but Google sees them.
So when a user searched for “Fastrack sunglasses”?
Lenskart could appear in the results, potentially diverting clicks away from Titan, even though Titan owned the brands.
Caught red-handed, Lenskart admitted the tags were there. They called it a mistake, scrubbed the references, and promised not to do it again.
The Court accepted the undertaking and closed the case but not without a warning shot.
Why? Under Section 29 of the Indian Trade Marks Act, even non-visible use of someone else’s trademark can count as infringement, it causes what's called initial interest confusion.
In plain English:
If a user searches for a known brand and ends up clicking on your site, even by accident, you've already intercepted their attention.
And legally, that’s enough to cross the line.And this isn’t new.
🇺🇸 Brookfield v. West Coast
🇺🇸 Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Netscape
🇪🇺 Google v. Louis Vuitton
Global courts have ruled on this before and I see 🇮🇳catching up fast.
This may look like Lenskart vs Titan but it is a wake-up call for an entire ecosystem that’s long normalized these quiet, grey-area tactics
Because if you grow by using someone else’s name, you’re not building your brand, you're borrowing theirs.
And one day, they’ll ask for it back (maybe in the court)
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