Cloudtail Gets Injunction From Delhi High Court Against Excel Telesonic

Cloudtail India Pvt. Ltd, the joint venture of Amazon, has received an injunction from the Delhi High Court against telecom technology company Excel Telesonic. Excel Telesonic has been asked to stop using the alleged “deceptively similar name” – ‘Cloudtele.’

Cloudtail had taken the company to court last month and sought damages worth about $155K (INR 1 Cr).

In its complaint, Cloudtail sought a “decree of permanent injunction restraining the defendant, its directors, officers, servants and agents and all others acting for and on their behalf from using, depicting, displaying in any manner whatsoever, the trademark trade name Cloudtele or any other deceptively similar trademark, as a part of their trading name company name.”

Mumbai-based Excel Telesonic was founded in 2010. It is a telecom service company that provides fibre network services for telecom operators in South Mumbai. The company counts Airtel and Idea as clients.

In the lawsuit, Cloudtail mentioned that its brand is a ‘well-known mark,’ and the use of Cloudtele by Excel Telesonic amounted to an infringement of its registered trademark. The company also asked for either “destruction“ of the domain name ‘http:www.cloudtele.com’ or for a transfer to the ecommerce seller.

Last month, at the last hearing, lawyers for Cloudtele said that the company will stop using the name ‘Cloudtele’ within the next four months. They also said that the company would only retain the word ‘cloud’ but will either prefix or suffix it with any other word and not ‘tail’ or ‘tele.’

In another instance of trademark infringement, US-based Paypal legally opposed Paytm for registering a ‘deceptively similar’ trademark. The filing for trademark opposition states that “the impugned trade mark is deceptively and confusingly similar to the opponent’s earlier trade mark inasmuch as the applicant has slavishly adopted the two-tone blue colour scheme of the opponent in its entirety.” In March 2017, a designer in Bengaluru claimed image copyright infringement of a line art image of Vidhana Soudha by cab aggregator Ola for a citywide billboard campaign promoting Ola Auto.

Cloudtail India Pvt. Ltd is a joint venture between Amazon Asia and Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy’s private investment fund Catamaran Ventures.

(The development was reported by ET)