Delhi HC, HINDWARE and Google Ads: keyword bidding as trademark infringement under Section 29(6)(d)

The Delhi High Court's judgment of 22 May 2026 in Hindware v. Google and Ors. — a 163-page judgment by Justice Mini Pushkarna — is the substantial operative authority on keyword-advertising trademark infringement in India. The judgment holds that the use of a registered trade mark as a bidding keyword on the Google Ads platform — to trigger sponsored advertisements of competing products to a user searching for the registered mark — constitutes infringement under Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, even where the registered mark does not physically appear in the advertisement that the bidder's keyword triggers.

The judgment is doctrinally consequential on two connected propositions: the reach of "use in advertising" under Section 29(6)(d), and the availability of Section 79 IT Act safe harbour to a platform that actively monetises the use of registered marks through its pay-per-click architecture.

The substantive shape of the dispute

The plaintiff — Hindware, a sanitaryware company holding the registered trade mark "HINDWARE" — alleged that Google and its subsidiaries had, through the Google Ads platform, permitted rival companies to bid on "HINDWARE" as a keyword. The consequence was that a user who typed "HINDWARE" into the Google search bar would be served sponsored advertisements of competing sanitaryware brands at the top of the search results — diverting internet traffic that, on the plaintiff's case, had been searching for the plaintiff's product.

The question for the Court was whether this conduct — by Google and by the competing advertisers — engaged Section 29(6)(d) of the Trade Marks Act and whether Google could, on the record before the Court, claim the safe-harbour protection under Section 79 of the IT Act.

What Section 29(6)(d) covers

Section 29(6) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, sets out the connected acts that, where carried out by a person who is not the registered proprietor or a permitted user, constitute "use" of a registered trade mark for the purposes of the infringement provisions. The acts include affixing the mark to goods, offering or supplying goods or services under the mark, importing or exporting goods under the mark, and — under sub-clause (d) — using the mark in business papers or in advertising.

The doctrinal question that arose in Hindware was whether the use of a registered mark as an invisible bidding keyword — where the mark does not appear in the advertisement that the bid triggers but supplies the trigger condition for the advertisement to be served — falls within "use in advertising" under sub-clause (d).

The Court answered the question in the affirmative. The reasoning rested on the proposition that the architecture of keyword bidding — where the registered mark operates as the trigger for an advertising display, even where the mark does not appear in the display itself — operates within the concept of "use in advertising" that the Trade Marks Act recognises. The Court held that the registered mark need not physically appear in the advertisement for the use to be covered by Section 29(6)(d).

The doctrinal proposition is consequential because it extends Section 29(6)(d) to a substantial category of digital-advertising practices that operate on invisible-backend-keyword architectures. Search-engine marketing, programmatic advertising, and similar architectures routinely operate on trigger conditions that are not directly visible to the user. The Hindware judgment treats these as within the reach of Section 29(6)(d).

The Section 79 safe-harbour analysis

The second consequential element of the judgment is the Court's treatment of Google's claim to safe-harbour protection under Section 79 of the IT Act.

Section 79 protects an intermediary from liability for third-party content where the intermediary is a passive conduit — providing access to or hosting content without exercising editorial control. The architecture is the Indian analogue to the safe-harbour protections in other jurisdictions; its content has been developed in a substantial line of authority including Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) and subsequent matters.

The Court held that Google could not, on the record before it, claim Section 79 protection in respect of its Google Ads platform. The reasoning rested on the proposition that Google was not, in the sense, a passive conduit. The pay-per-click architecture — under which Google monetises the keyword-bidding mechanism, including bids placed on registered trademarks — makes Google an active participant in the advertising display. The architecture is not the publication of content that a third party has originated; it is the operation of a bidding system that Google itself designs, operates, and monetises.

The doctrinal proposition is that Section 79 safe harbour is not available to an intermediary whose business operates on the active facilitation and monetisation of the use of registered trademarks as advertising triggers. The intermediary's role — active and monetising — defeats the safe-harbour claim.

The damages

The judgment awarded damages of ₹30 lakh in favour of Hindware. The computation methodology — the basis on which the quantum was arrived at — was not, in the public reporting of the judgment, set out in detail. The proposition the quantum reflects, however, is that the architecture had operated to divert substantial revenue from the plaintiff's products to the competing advertisers, and that Google had benefited from this diversion through its pay-per-click revenue.

The quantum has been the subject of practitioner commentary on whether ₹30 lakh adequately captures the harm in a matter of this scale. The doctrinal proposition that damages are available — and that an intermediary's safe-harbour claim does not insulate it from damages where the safe-harbour does not apply — is, in any event, the contribution of this element of the judgment.

The doctrinal context

The judgment sits in a developing line on keyword-advertising trademark infringement. The Delhi High Court has, across recent years, been the principal forum for this line of authority. The direction across the line has been towards treating keyword bidding on registered trademarks as actionable infringement, with the intermediary's safe-harbour position contested.

The Hindware judgment is the most engagement of the line so far. The 163-page reasoning supplies the doctrinal architecture on which subsequent cases will operate.

The line also engages with the broader doctrinal question of the intermediary's substantive position. The pay-per-click monetisation architecture — and its relationship to the safe-harbour protections — is a doctrinal question that operates beyond trademark law and into the broader architecture of intermediary liability.

What practitioners take from the judgment today

For IP litigators in the digital-advertising space, the Hindware judgment is the operative authority on keyword-advertising trademark infringement. The proposition — that Section 29(6)(d) reaches invisible-backend-keyword use — opens a substantial body of digital-advertising practice to infringement analysis.

For corporate and intermediary practitioners advising platform clients, the judgment is a caution. The pay-per-click architecture — and similar architectures that substantively monetise the use of third-party trademarks — does not, on the Hindware line, attract Section 79 safe-harbour protection.

For brand owners, the judgment supplies a working avenue against competitive keyword bidding. The pleading template — under Section 29(6)(d), against both the competing advertiser and the platform — has now been operationalised in a substantial judgment.

What the judgment did not decide

Three limits should be flagged.

First, the judgment operates on the findings of fact that the record disclosed. Other intermediaries operating with different architectures — including platforms that do not substantively monetise the keyword bidding, or platforms that do not substantively participate in the selection of keywords — may attract different doctrinal analysis.

Second, the judgment does not engage substantively with the question of what advertising disclosures by the competing advertiser would, if present, mitigate or eliminate the infringement. The content of the advertisement — including whether it discloses the identity of the advertiser and the non-affiliation with the registered mark — has been the subject of engagement in other jurisdictions; the Indian doctrinal position is yet to be settled.

Third, the judgment does not engage substantively with the constitutional questions that have been raised about Section 79's architecture — including the scope of intermediary liability and the relationship between Section 79 and the constitutional protections for free expression. Those questions remain open.

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