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.

If you’re used to reading about counterfeit litigation in the US, UK or India, the UAE looks different. Search for “UAE trademark court cases 2025” and you won’t find a long list of widely reported civil judgments. That’s not because counterfeiting isn’t being tackled. It’s because the UAE’s model puts the weight on criminal prosecution and administrative enforcement, customs seizures, inspection campaigns, Department of Economic Development and regulator action, rather than brand owners slugging it out in open court for years. Two rulings from 2025 show both sides of that machinery working, and the seizure numbers show why the case count alone understates how much enforcement is actually happening.

The law behind the crackdown

UAE trademark protection sits under Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 on Trademarks. It replaced the older framework, and it’s the law every 2025 case below was decided under.

Two articles matter most for counterfeiting specifically. Article 49 covers forging or imitating a registered trademark in a way that could confuse the public: imprisonment plus a fine of no less than AED 100,000 and no more than AED 1,000,000, or either penalty on its own. Article 50 covers selling or offering counterfeit goods for sale: up to one year in prison and/or a fine of AED 50,000 to AED 200,000. Courts can also order confiscation and destruction of the goods.

That combination, criminal exposure plus confiscation, is what makes the enforcement model different from civil-litigation-led markets. A brand owner doesn’t need to win a multi-year lawsuit to see a seller shut down. A police or Department of Economic Development referral can end in a criminal conviction.

Case one: Ajman’s maximum-penalty ruling

On 31 January 2025, a court in Ajman convicted a defendant of imitating, selling and promoting goods under a protected trademark. The court applied the maximum penalty available under Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021: one year’s imprisonment, an AED 1 million fine, and confiscation of the counterfeit goods.

It’s one of the clearest examples of the criminal track being used at full strength rather than settled down to a fine alone, reported as a deliberate signal from the judiciary that counterfeiting carries real custodial risk, not just a cost of doing business.

Case two: Abu Dhabi Commercial Court halts a trademark impersonator

The second confirmed 2025 action runs through the civil courts instead. The Abu Dhabi Commercial Court ruled that a local retail store had to immediately stop using a globally recognised fashion and e-commerce trademark across its storefront, products, and online and social media presence. The store had used the brand’s name and logo in a way that misled customers into thinking it was affiliated with the original company, which trades exclusively online.

The court ordered the infringing trade name struck from Abu Dhabi’s Department of Economic Development records and from commercial registries across the UAE, and banned the store from using the trademark in any form going forward, including on signage, packaging and social accounts. The ruling was announced on 9 July 2025, and it didn’t stop at first instance: it was upheld on appeal and confirmed by the Court of Cassation, making it final and enforceable UAE-wide.

Two verified, independently reported cases is a smaller list than the five-or-more you’ll find in roundups of India, the US or the UK. That’s the honest count. It reflects a structural difference, not a gap in research: UAE counterfeit enforcement produces convictions and injunctions, but relatively few of them get individually named and reported the way common-law civil suits do.

The numbers behind the headlines

The seizure and inspection data fill in the picture that named cases alone can’t. Dubai Customs reported 68 seizures of counterfeit goods in the first quarter of 2025 alone, worth around Dh42.195 million, spanning watches, eyewear, electronics, clothing, fabrics, bags and shoes.

In Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi Registration Authority (ADRA) reported that the value of counterfeit and non-compliant goods seized across the emirate during 2025 exceeded AED 1.8 million. That figure came out of 465 inspection campaigns targeting commercial establishments and retail outlets, a 16.2% increase on the 400 campaigns run in 2024, and 16,748 inspection visits, more than double 2024’s 6,665, resulting in 104 violations and 294 warnings.

Put together, that’s tens of millions of dirhams in seized counterfeit stock and thousands of inspection visits across just two emirates in a single year, run largely without a matching wave of named court judgments. It’s the clearest evidence that the UAE’s enforcement effort is real and growing, even where it doesn’t produce the kind of case-by-case headlines seen elsewhere.

What this means if you sell into the UAE

For a brand owner, the practical takeaway isn’t that the UAE is soft on counterfeiting. It’s that the enforcement route runs mostly through customs, DED and regulator inspection channels and criminal referral rather than brand-initiated civil suits, so the burden shifts onto having documented proof, test purchases, listing screenshots, seller identifiers, dates, ready to hand a regulator or prosecutor rather than a law firm.

That’s the gap continuous monitoring closes. Truviss’s detect, verify, enforce loop builds that evidence trail automatically across marketplaces and social channels, so when a counterfeit listing or impersonating storefront turns up in the UAE, there’s already a verified record ready to support a customs referral, a DED complaint, or a criminal case, rather than starting from scratch after the fact. The same monitoring principle underpins how brands protect intellectual property in e-commerce more broadly, and it applies just as much to impersonation on social media as it does to storefronts.

Elsewhere on Truviss, a similar enforcement-track piece looks at how US courts are hitting counterfeiters harder under the Seventh Circuit, a useful contrast to the UAE’s criminal and administrative-led approach above.

The UAE’s counterfeit enforcement story in 2025 is two confirmed rulings, a criminal maximum-penalty conviction in Ajman and a civil injunction upheld to the Court of Cassation in Abu Dhabi, sitting on top of a much larger, less visible base of customs seizures and inspection campaigns. For brands selling into the region, that means enforcement is active and improving, but it rewards being monitored and documentation-ready well before a dispute reaches a courtroom.