[This post is authored by Anushka Kamabar. Anushka is a fourth-year B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) student at the National Law School of India University. Her previous posts can be accessed here.]
In its decision on September 12, 2025 , the Delhi High Court declined to grant an interim injunction to WOW Momo Foods Pvt. Ltd. against the defendants, intending to trade as ‘WOW BURGER’. The Court’s reasoning reiterates trademark principles on non-distinctiveness, the sanctity of disclaimers, and the importance of approaching the Court with clean hands.
The suit was brought as by WOW Momo, a major player in the Indian food market with over 600 outlets. It was in the nature of a quia timet action, i.e. seeking preventative relief before an actual act of infringement – in this case, before the Hong Kong-based defendants launched their burger business in India under the ‘WOW BURGER’ mark. WOW Momo argued that ‘WOW’ was the “essential, dominant, and distinctive feature” of their family of marks, had acquired them immense goodwill, and that the use of ‘WOW BURGER’ on products would cause confusion.
Despite no one appearing on behalf of the defendants, the Court rebutted these contentions by way of its rigorous application of the anti-dissection rule, i.e., that a composite mark must be compared as a whole with the allegedly infringing mark (instead of being reduced to its constituent parts). The Court rejected WOW Momo’s piecemeal approach of isolating ‘WOW’ as the dominant element of its marks, emphasizing that the source identifiers for WOW Momo was the entire composite mark. In doing so, it relied on the Supreme Court’s words of caution against the cherry-picking of generic features from marks to create cases of infringement.
Having narrowed down the subject of its analysis to be the entire composite mark, ‘WOW MOMO, the Court proceeded to find no deceptive similarity with ‘Wow Burger,’ noting that the colour schemes, stylization, and overall commercial impression were entirely different. The mere presence of a common dictionary word was held as being insufficient to establish infringement, especially when that word was generic.
Descriptive Marks and Echoes of the Yatra case
The Court held that common laudatory descriptive terms like ‘wow’ fall squarely within the prohibition of Section 9(1)(b) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, which bars registration of marks that designate the quality or characteristic of goods/services. For this, the judgement also makes the extensive and telling use of one of its recent judgements in Yatra Online Limited v. Mach Conferences and Events Limited (discussed by Subhalaxmi here).
As in the case of ‘yatra,’ which the Court has noted bears generic usage within travel services, ‘WOW’ can be considered generic within the food and hospitality industry. The Court therefore extensively quotes Yatra to drive home the point that WOW Momo could not claim a monopoly over a generic word and had to run the risk of it being used by others. This, as the Court notes, would follow as a consequence of Section 30(2)(a) of the Act, which permits third parties to use generic words – even if part of a registered composite mark – honestly to describe their own goods or services
This is also connected with the most damning part of the case for WOW Momo, which was its own past admissions, conceding to the generic nature of the term. The Court placed reliance on its history in proceedings before the Registrar of Trademarks, in which the latter had granted registrations for composite marks like ‘WOW! CHINA’, while imposing disclaimers that no exclusive rights were granted over the individual words ‘WOW’ and ‘CHINA’. WOW Momo itself had responded to the Registrar’s objections, stating that its mark was a combination of English dictionary words, which was distinctive “when considered as a whole.”
Latching onto these admissions, the Court stated that at the interim stage, they would operate as against the party making them, and WOW Momo had lost the right to now turn around and argue that ‘WOW’ alone was distinctive after having explicitly told the Registry the opposite. As the Court noted, this would also amount to flouting the Registry’s disclaimers and expanding the scope of the rights granted beyond their legitimate bounds (for a discussion of disclaimed trademarks, see the posts here and here).
A Side of Reality
A final layer of incredulity in WOW Momo’s case was that the phrase alleged to be infringing – ‘WOW! BURGER’ – was not even a trademark used by WOW Momo. Despite its claims of having used it since 2009, the evidence showed it was used as a menu item until 2018, after which it disappeared entirely. The Court concluded that this was an attempt at misleading the Court, and casted doubts on the bona fides of WOW Momo’s case for an injunction. This is yet another instance of Courts insisting on parties seeking trademark remedies with clean hands, after the Bombay High Court employing similar reasoning in the V3 Fashion case last week.
This case signals the Courts’ consistent intolerance of attempts to use trademark law to cordon off commonly used terms. It also indicates that building a brand strategy based on a descriptive or generic word may be a gamble in light of potential third party claims over the term.