Between late 2025 and mid-2026, Indian courts handed down six trademark and counterfeit rulings worth reading together, not because they’re the “top” cases by some ranking, but because they show the same shift happening from six different directions. An injunction used to be the finish line in an Indian trademark suit. In these six cases, it was the starting point: courts ordered infringing stock physically destroyed rather than repurposed, pushed a company director toward arrest for ignoring a court order, and let a court-appointed Local Commissioner walk out of a raid with a printing press and 35,000 counterfeit boxes.

Two of the six already have a full write-up on this blog, so we’ll cover them in one line each and spend the rest of this piece on four rulings that haven’t been covered here yet.

The two we’ve already covered

Havells vs Havai: the Delhi High Court ruled that owning a registered trademark doesn’t automatically defeat a passing-off claim against a lookalike brand.

₹3.34 crore J&J counterfeit medical device ruling: the Delhi High Court reframed counterfeiting as a public-safety issue, not just a trademark dispute, when it awarded Johnson & Johnson ₹3.34 crore over fake surgical devices.

Havells India Ltd v Vijay: the Local Commissioner walks out with the evidence

The Commercial Court at Karkardooma, Delhi decided CS(Comm.) No. 294/2024 on 30 June 2026, and the facts read less like a paperwork dispute than a factory bust. A court-appointed Local Commissioner searched the defendant’s premises and found a printing press and a metal plate set up specifically to print counterfeit HAVELLS-branded corrugated packaging. The same search recovered 34,950 packaging boxes carrying the HAVELLS mark and trade dress.

The defendant argued he was simply a scrap dealer who happened to have the material on hand. The court rejected that, upheld the legality of the search-and-seizure operation, and found statutory infringement under Section 29(1) of the Trade Marks Act alongside copyright infringement and passing off. The result: a permanent injunction plus damages of over ₹26 lakh, made up of compensatory damages, punitive damages, and litigation costs, with delivery-up of everything seized for destruction.

What makes this one distinct from a typical counterfeit-goods seizure is that the target wasn’t the finished fakes sitting in a warehouse, it was the equipment making them. A printing press and a metal plate are reusable infrastructure. Taking those out, not just the current batch of boxes, is what closes the operation rather than just delaying it.

Ferrero’s Nutella jars: when a court says no to its own compromise

Ferrero’s case over the Nutella jar’s registered shape started with a straightforward result: Local Commissioners seized roughly 3.05 lakh glass jars from three locations run by Firozabad-based glass manufacturers, deceptively similar to the registered Nutella jar shape, along with cartons and brochures carrying the Nutella name. The Delhi High Court’s initial order, in late 2025, permanently restrained the manufacturers and awarded ₹10 lakh in costs.

Then the court did something unusual: it suggested the seized jars, rather than being destroyed, could be filled with Ferrero’s own product and donated to NGOs as a CSR gesture. It’s an understandable instinct, since 3.05 lakh jars is a lot of glass to throw away.

On appeal, a division bench of Justice C Hari Shankar and Justice Om Prakash Shukla took a different view. In a judgment dated 6 January 2026, the bench upheld the seizure and delivery-up of the jars to Ferrero but held that they must be destroyed and not put to any commercial or other use, however well-intentioned. Infringing goods, once established as infringing, don’t get a second life just because the alternative use is charitable rather than commercial.

Dhanuka Agritech v Agrim Wholesale: counterfeits sorted into the marketplace’s own categories

Dhanuka Agritech’s case against Agrim Wholesale is a reminder that a counterfeit doesn’t need a back-alley seizure to reach a buyer, sometimes it’s sitting inside a legitimate-looking app’s own category system. Agrim’s mobile marketplace listed unauthorised Dhanuka-branded agrochemicals under an “Infringing Products” tag positioned right alongside a “Popular Brand Category” tag, according to Dhanuka’s filing.

The Delhi High Court, in an interim order under CS(COMM) 1056/2025 (Justice Tejas Karia), restrained Agrim from further unauthorised use of the DHANUKA mark and ordered the infringing listings taken down within 72 hours. Dhanuka’s claim also invoked the Insecticides Act, 1968 and Insecticides Rules, 1971, since the products in question are regulated agrochemicals, not just branded goods.

This case sits apart from the others on this list because the infringement moved through a platform’s own structure rather than a physical counterfeit operation, and because agrochemicals carry a regulatory layer, safety and registration requirements under the Insecticides Act, on top of the ordinary trademark question.

Jain Shikanji: when ignoring the injunction becomes the whole story

The Jain Shikanji case isn’t really about the original trademark dispute any more, it’s about what happens when a company keeps going after it loses. The underlying injunction, restraining use of the “JAIN SHIKANJI” mark, was granted by a trial court back in November 2022. In June 2023, the trial court found the company’s director, Anubhav Jain, guilty of wilfully disobeying that injunction.

Jain then tried to purge the contempt with an unconditional apology. On 2 July 2026, the Delhi High Court, in a judgment by Justice Jyoti Singh, upheld the trial court’s refusal to accept it, affirming arrest warrants and property attachment under Order XXXIX Rule 2A of the Civil Procedure Code, while reducing the exemplary costs from ₹5 lakh to ₹3 lakh.

The lesson here has less to do with the trademark itself and more to do with enforcement after the ruling. A court order restraining use of a mark only works if someone is watching for continued use after the fact, since the violation that actually triggers contempt proceedings happens well after the original judgment, often quietly, until someone notices.

What six wins with no early detection have in common

None of these six rulings started with the brand’s own systems catching the counterfeit in real time. They started with a raid, a court-ordered search, a distributor’s slip surfacing years later, or a marketplace listing that someone happened to flag. By the time each case reached a courtroom, the fakes had already been manufactured, packaged, and in Havells’ case, printed at industrial scale, for however long it took a Local Commissioner or an investigator to catch up.

That gap between “infringement starts” and “someone notices” is exactly what continuous marketplace monitoring is built to close. Truviss’s marketplace scanner watches 5,000+ marketplaces around the clock, checking listings against 500+ data points, so a counterfeit seller shows up on a dashboard before they’ve printed 35,000 boxes or built out an “Infringing Products” category of their own. It doesn’t replace litigation, Havells and Dhanuka both still needed a court, it shortens the runway a counterfeiter gets before someone’s watching.

The pattern is enforcement, not just injunctions

Read together, these six cases show Indian courts willing to go further than a standard restraining order: punitive damages layered on compensatory awards, destruction orders that override even the court’s own earlier leniency, and contempt consequences with real teeth for defendants who ignore what they’ve already been told to stop. That’s a meaningful shift, and it should reassure any brand weighing whether litigation in India is worth pursuing.

But litigation is still a response, not a detection system. Every case above took months to years between the infringement starting and the ruling landing. Pairing that legal escalation with ongoing brand-abuse monitoring is what catches the next counterfeit operation while it’s still small enough to shut down without a printing press raid making the news. If your brand is dealing with counterfeit listings, unauthorised resellers, or a lookalike operation you’ve only just noticed, book a demo with Truviss to see how the monitoring side of this actually works.