Friday, March 05, 2010

Issued in the interest of Rin users

If there's one aspect of my approach to legal learning I'll happily take criticism for (aside from my sub-zero levels of knowledge of Indian public law) it's that my interest in intellectual property rights is too academic and not practical enough. I happily/illegally download music off the net, I liberally use products with obviously fake trademarks and, in general, am no more discerning than the average Indian couch potato (a category, sadly, that I'm not yet qualified/fat enough for).

However, having endured Spain hammer India 5-2 last night, I sat down in front of the telly with my mum and grandmum (with my brother playing WWE Raw v. Smackdown! 2010 on his PSP by the plug point on the side) waiting for them to finish watching 12/24 Karol Bagh on Zee TV so that I could take over at 11 to watch Apolo Ohno on The Tonight Show with a returning Jay Leno (okay fine, I was also curious about what song Avril Lavigne would sing. There. I said it.)

As you can imagine, trying to understand the complications of the relationships on the Zee show proved to be far too difficult for a person with little understanding of real relationships and I was about to turn to the fridge to get some guava juice when I was stopped in my tracks by an advertisement.

Two mothers are waiting at a bus-stop for their kids to return from school. They're carrying a basket each. Both baskets are full of clothes and one mother's basket has a Rin packet on top of it while the other mother's basket has a Tide packet on top of it, crucially, all in clear view (what mothers are doing with laundry at a bus-stop waiting to pick up their kids is besides the point, of course). The Tide mom's kid emerges first from the bus wearing what can generously be described as an incredibly soiled version of what used to be a white shirt. The Rin mom's kid appears from behind him in a flash, with the traditional blazing white which all detergent manufacturers promise us but which we all know doesn't exist in reality. The Rin kid asks his mom why Tide aunty is so stunned and that's when the one-two punch hits you. One, the voice-over guy says something along the lines of "kyunki Rin Tide se behtar hai" followed by the kicker--the last screen in the ad features a black screen with a Rin packet with the words "issued in the interest of Rin users" in white lettering.

Put up your hand if you think this is a violation of the objective test for product disparagement arrived at by a joint reading of Section 29(8) and 30(1) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. That's right. Both my hands are up too. However, Indian Courts seem to have been reluctant to follow the line of cases that, in truth, begins from White v. Mellin in 1895 and seemed to have been put to bed beyond a shadow of a doubt in Erven Warnink (the Advocaat case) in the late 1970s.

Indeed, my pro-consumerism blood boiled long enough at the Rin fiasco for me to run to Manupatra and find 1999's Reckit & Colman v. VG Ramachandran (which I'd actually prepped to present during the IPR TAship) actually permits what Rin is doing. However, it also goes on to say that a trader, in trying to highlight that his goods are better than his competitor's, ever say that his competitor's goods are bad. Surely, Tide boy with the soiled brown shirt is a direct enough way of saying Tide sucks. Surely, it fits comfortably within any sane understanding of product disparagement with room to spare. Surely, Tide are going to take Rin to Court.

I laughed long and hard at the Rin ad and almost missed the irony of a Tide ad following immediately after and sticking to the good old-fashioned, straight-laced method of advertisement--showing that your product rules, in objective terms. My brother, who, for a twelve-year-old kid, has a remarkable eye for pop culture-related legal news, reliably informed me that a similar case of product mudslinging between Horlicks and Complan has, in fact, been taken to Court, based on disparaging cross-ads reminiscent of the Pepsi/Sprite and Hero Honda/Bajaj brand wars of the late 1990s.

To make things worse, I also saw an Asian Paints advert selling its 'Colour Stay' paint set to Ric Flair's decades-old theme song. There is no justice in this world!   

P.S. Karthik Calling Karthik isn't as bad as people say it is, though Farhan Akhtar (and I don't care what people say he is) is the biggest casting mistake in the movie. Imagine how good it could've been if a decent actor played that role.

3 comments:

woenvu said...

um, isn't ric flair's theme music considerably older than a few decades, seeing as it is also sprach zarathustra?

Shreya said...

No way! He was hot and awesome! I don't think anyone could have played it better... Name ONE actor.

aandthirtyeights said...

An interesting piece of gossip - Rin has sued Tide in the Madras High Court for disparagement in re another advertisement!

I'm not sure if there's a point to this story but I'm going to tell it again.

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I've been wilfully caught up in the self-defeating quest to get to know myself for years. I've never expected anything beneficial to result from such a quest. I tend to evoke extremely polarised reactions from people I get to know in passing. Consequently, only those people who know me inside-out would honestly claim that I'm a person who's just "alright." It's not a coincidence that the description I've laid out above has no fewer than, title included, eleven references to me (make that twelve). I'm affectionately referred to as "Ego." I think that last statement might have given away a tad too much. Welcome Aboard.

IHTRTRS ke pichle episode mein aapne dekha...

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