GIST OF THE CASE:

Abhijeet Bhansali, a Youtuber who goes by the name “Bearded Chakra” was recently
alleged by Marico for disparaging one of their products, the Parachute Coconut Oil.
Marico filed a interim injunction at he High Court of Bombay. They alleged that this led
to infringement of their ‘Parachute’ trademark. The HC held that there was an
unauthorized use of the trademark and also gave out information that is misleading or
defaming the Parachute Coconut Oil by using ‘educating the public’ as a defence. The
HC ordered the video to be taken down and highlighted the importance of responsibility.

ISSUES RAISED:

So in the video, the defendant goes on to review one of the Plaintiff’s most popular
product. In the video, he is clearly seen to be making statements that seem to be
disparaging the product. So here, in order for the claims to be proved as disparagement of
the plaintiff’s goods, there are 3 essentials put forward (quoted in Hindustan Unilever
Limited v Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd.). The 3 essentials
are:

(i) that the defendant’s statements are false

(ii) that the statements were made maliciously or recklessly
(iii) that the said statements caused special damages to the plaintiff.

(i) that the defendant’s statements are false

The defendant during the course of the video made a lot of statements against the
product used. The defendant made statements that made him look like a expert on the
subject. He further claims that he did research on his own using another product of the
same type but by a different manufacturer and he comes to a conclusion on his own.
Here we don’t know how authentic the research is, or how correct the results are.
Hence the defendant should have taken it to someone who has specialized knowledge
on the subjects and then conducted tests and not be doing any reaseach on his own as
the results may not be correct. Also during the video the defendant compares the oil
 with another oil by another manufacturer. The act of comparison that the defendant
was trying to achieve cannot be considered a valid one as he uses another variety of
oil to compare. Hence the comparison was in vain. Hence we can conclude the first
condition by saying that the claims made by the defendant were in fact, false and thus
it can be considered a case of disparagement.

(ii) that the statements were made maliciously or recklessly:

In the video, the person compares both of the products with one another and through
research by the defendant (which is still not a valid one), comes to the conclusion that
the smell and the discoloration found is a sign of use of low quality resources to make
the oil. The defendant can be found to be reckless as he didn’t use proper methods
for the tests which he used as a important point for the conclusion.

(iii) that the said statements caused special damages to the plaintiff:

It can be easily concluded that the plaintiff suffered damages as the video by the
defendant was uploaded in a YouTube. The defendant had around +200k sunscribers
at that time of uploading of the video and also had around +5k likes. So it is easy to
say that the plaintiff was severely impacted by the video and the reputation was
tainted because of it and also damages were caused.

CONCLUSION:

The plaintiff filed an application for interim injunction at the HC of Bombay and asked
the defendant to take down the video. But then the Division Bench got the decision
reversed and asked for only modifications to the video rather than taking it fully down
from the platform. In my opinion, the initial decision should not have been reversed as the
video even if it is put up with only modifications, the subject of the video remains the
same i.e trying to tell the audience to not use the product.