Living Media India v. Alpha Dealcom — "Aaj Tak" Trademark Case

Citation & Court

Living Media India Ltd. & Ors. v. Alpha Dealcom Pvt. Ltd. & Ors., Delhi High Court, reported at 2016 (66) PTC 200 (Del).

The Dispute

Living Media, owner of the well-known Hindi news channel "Aaj Tak" (meaning "Till Today"), sought to restrain a competing channel from using the word "TODAY" in its own mark, arguing its long and prominent use of "Aaj Tak" gave it rights over the underlying concept of "today" in the news-broadcasting trade.

What the Court Held

The Delhi High Court held that "TODAY," in the context of current-events broadcasting, is a generic and descriptive word — and that its use in "Aaj Tak" did not by itself make "TODAY" so distinctive as to have acquired secondary meaning exclusive to Living Media. The Court noted that several other permitted channels used the same word (Russia Today, Live Today, Management Today, among others), which supported the finding that the word remained generic across the trade rather than distinctive of any one broadcaster.

How to Use This in Your Reply

Use this whenever a party with a strong, well-known brand tries to claim exclusivity over a common English word simply because that word appears inside their famous mark. The presence of multiple independent, permitted third-party users of the same word in the same trade is strong evidence against any single party's claim to distinctiveness in that word alone.

Key takeaway: Fame in a composite mark does not automatically extend exclusivity to a common word buried inside it, if that word remains in genuine industry-wide use.