Urban Company Agrees Before Delhi High Court To Edit One Of Ads Allegedly Disparaging Kent RO Products
Urban Company (UC), maker of the Native RO water purifier, agreed before the Delhi High Court on Tuesday to edit one of three advertisements that Kent RO Systems alleged were disparaging its products, without agreeing to take it down entirely.
The matter was heard by Justice Tushar Rao Gedela, with Senior Advocate Amit Sibal appearing for Urban Company and counsel for Kent RO walking the court through the three advertisements frame by frame.
Kent RO argued that the ads, part of a campaign built around a fictional "Institute of Purifier Management," depicted its products in a manner designed to mislead consumers.
The main grievance was a sequence in the third advertisement where a person tastes water purified by a machine the plaintiff identified as its Kent Max product and immediately spits it out.
"He is trying to convey a message that the water produced by my purifier is so undrinkable," counsel submitted, calling it a "classical textbook case of disparagement." The counsel also flagged another ad showing a purifier leaking so badly that a person could take a shower under it.
Senior Advocate Amit Sibal contested the identification itself, arguing that Kent had not discharged its burden of showing that the products depicted in the ads were actually theirs. He placed before the court a compilation showing over twenty manufacturers currently selling water purifiers with near-identical form factors. He also pointed out that Kent held no trademark, patent, or live design registration for the products it claimed were depicted.
After the matter was taken up post-lunch, UC informed the court that without prejudice to its rights, it undertook not to publish Advertisement No. 3 in its current form and would make appropriate edits to the screenshots at pages 59 and 60 of the plaint, which showed the spitting sequence.
The court noted that Advertisement No. 3 was the most critical of the three since it directly went to the quality of the plaintiff's product. On the remaining two advertisements, no interim directions were passed.
The matter will now be listed in the third week of July for hearing of the interim injunction application, by which time Urban Company will file its reply.
The court also directed that neither party shall make any reference to the suit or the dispute to the media.