Deceptive Similarity and Interim Injunctions in Trademark Law: An Analysis of Starbucks Corp. V. Sardarbuksh Coffee & Co.

In a world of growing markets, adroit sellers and the resultant surge in competition, every component of said market, regardless of how big or small they are, are in a quintessential need for protection of their ideas from being robbed, refurbished and repurposed as someone else’s. This results in consumer confusion, where an ordinary prudent consumer is subject to deception due to local brands mimicking the trademark or identity of a well known brand. There also exists the contrasting issue of a single market giant swallowing the trivial components of the market by ultimately acquiring and integrating all the knowledge and intellectual works of the latter, thereby eliminating a competitive market structure and establishing a monopoly. A plethora of reasons such as these are why the Law of Intellectual Property Rights exists; the acknowledgement of ideas as the properties of those that conceived it and the crucial importance of the protection of the properties, giving abstract concepts very concrete protection. A fine example of this is the case of Starbucks Corp. v. Sardarbuksh and Co. and Ors., where the importance of the core aspects of a company’s trademark and how far must a competing company’s mark must be, by virtue of appearance, nomenclature and other connections to the source identifier, from the former’s mark to actually not constitute an infringement.