The Supreme Court confronted this deceptively simple question at the heart of a trademark battle between two matrimonial platforms.
Can anyone claim exclusive rights over the word “Jodi” when it is being used to sell the very service of finding a match?
The bench then gave the parties a week to explore a settlement. For Matrimony.com, the stakes go beyond a change of name. Its counsel told the Supreme Court that the platform had been protected since its launch in 2009, contrasting its single registered mark with Matrimony.com’s hundreds of trademark registrations.
The bench, however, said the high court order merely operated as an injunction against Matrimony.com’s use of the mark. When Sibal pointed out that nearly 30 lakh users had paid for the service, particularly from middle- and lower-income groups, he offered to change the branding immediately to “Jodii Matrimony” to ensure that the business did not shut down. “We are all for a resolution,” it said, making clear that if the parties failed to settle, the court would proceed to decide the appeal and that it was inclined to dismiss the appeal. The company told the Supreme Court that millions of users had paid for the Jodii service and that an immediate prohibition could disrupt a platform designed specifically for non-English-speaking users. For FreeElective, the dispute is about protecting the goodwill it says it built around Jodi365 over nearly two decades.
