Granting an interim injunction in favour of online travel agency MakeMyTrip in the Google AdWord case, the Delhi High Court has issued a bailable warrant against the directors of smaller rival HappyEasyGo India.
It is a two-year-old trademark infringement case filed by MakeMyTrip. The warrants have been issued for not appearing before the court on the date of hearing.
"Issue bailable warrants for personal presence of contemnors No 2 and 3, namely, Rajesh Kumar Dathik and Neelam Rani on a surety of Rs 50,000 each before this court on the next date of hearing," said the court order dated February 26.
The issue dates back to May 2018 when MakeMyTrip had filed a case against lesser known rival HappyEasyGo for infringing intellectual property rights. The court had granted an ex-parte ad-interim injunction in favour of MMT, directing HappyEasyGo to not bid on MakeMyTrip related keywords, till further orders on Google’s AdWord program or any other AdWord Program.
"However in December 2020 when the travel market started opening up after COVID, we again saw that HappyEasyGo was violating the order of 2018 and was using MakeMyTrip as the keyword on the adword program which led MMT to file another contempt. On this fresh contempt, notice was issued and the court asked HappyEasyGo directors to appear before court on Feb 26. On that date since the directors failed to appear, the court issued bailable warrants against the directors of HappyEasyGo and also directed Google to suspend all the adword accounts of HappyEasyGo which were being run by HappyEasyGo on Google's Adword platform," said Mohit Goel, partner at Sim And San, one of the counsels appearing for Makemytrip told Moneycontrol.
Meanwhile, the court has also directed Google to block the Google Ads account of HappyEasyGo.
This is not the only case MakeMyTrip is fighting. The company has a similar case against EaseMyTrip which is planning an IPO in March 2021, among almost half a dozen cases.
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