An interim injunction restraining a rival from using your trademark is only as good as your ability to prove, later, that they broke it. In India, that proof usually surfaces on a phone or a laptop: a screenshot of a listing on an e-commerce site, a photograph of a shop signage, an invoice from a covert purchase, a cached page pulled off a hotel booking platform. The question that decides whether a trademark contempt plea succeeds or collapses is rarely about the trademark itself. It is about whether that electronic material can survive scrutiny in court.
This matters because an application alleging violation of a trademark injunction is not a fresh infringement suit where the pleadings do the heavy lifting. It is a summary proceeding built almost entirely on evidence of what the defendant did after the injunction was granted. If that evidence is a bundle of unauthenticated screenshots, the application can fail even when the violation actually happened. Here is what Indian courts have accepted, and rejected, as proof of trademark injunction violations, and how to build a file that holds up.
What a Trademark Contempt Plea Actually Is
Most litigants call any injunction violation contempt, but the label matters less than the provision being invoked. When a party disobeys a temporary injunction passed under Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2 of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, the standard remedy is an application under Order XXXIX Rule 2A of the CPC, not a fresh petition under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971. Courts have repeatedly held that where the CPC itself provides a mechanism for enforcing its own orders, that mechanism is the one to use first.
The Delhi High Court's 2023 order in Louis Vuitton Malletier v. Capital General Store & Ors. shows the tension in this area of law. The defendant admitted to selling belts bearing the LV mark for nearly a year after the injunction was passed[1]. Rather than debating whether the violation happened, the court spent much of its reasoning on a harder question: is Order XXXIX Rule 2A meant to punish, or merely to enforce compliance? The Supreme Court has gone both ways on this. Food Corporation of India v. Sukh Deo Prasad and U.C. Surendranath v. Mambally's Bakery treated the power as punitive and required proof of wilful disobedience. Amazon.Com NV Investment Holdings LLC v. Future Retail Ltd. pushed back, holding that Rule 2A exists primarily to enforce interim orders and that reading wilfulness into it may not survive scrutiny by a larger bench. The Delhi High Court did not need to resolve that conflict in Louis Vuitton because the defendant admitted the breach outright, but the split explains why courts examine your proof of disobedience so closely: the more clearly you can show a deliberate, continuing violation, the less the punitive-versus-enforcement debate matters to your outcome.
A commentary on the same order in Bar and Bench makes a point worth carrying into any contempt filing: the plaintiff in that case also tried to invoke Section 105 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, which deals with enhanced penalties for a previously convicted offender, to paint the defendant as a recalcitrant counterfeiter. The court would have none of it. Section 105 requires an actual prior criminal conviction, and an interim application is not the place to import criminal-law consequences into a civil dispute. The Trade Marks Act, 1999 does, however, give the court a more directly useful power at the interim stage itself. Section 135 lets a court order discovery of documents and preservation of infringing goods and evidence while granting the injunction[2]. Plaintiffs who ask for this at the time the injunction is granted, rather than waiting for a violation to occur, are in a far stronger position when they later need to prove disobedience.
What must the applicant establish before the Court even examines the electronic evidence?
Before the Court turns to the electronic evidence, the applicant must first establish the foundational requirements of a claim under Order XXXIX Rule 2A. There must be a valid and subsisting injunction capable of enforcement, material showing that the respondent had notice or knowledge of that order, evidence that the impugned acts were committed after the injunction came into force, and a clear nexus between those acts and the conduct restrained by the Court. Since deliberate disobedience presupposes knowledge of the injunction, practitioners should also preserve material demonstrating that the order was brought to the respondent's notice, such as service reports, courier tracking records, email acknowledgements, WhatsApp delivery records, appearances through counsel, or statements made during court proceedings. Only after these foundational requirements are established does the Court examine whether the electronic evidence reliably proves the alleged breach.
Why Screenshots Alone Rarely Survive Cross-Examination
The single biggest reason trademark contempt applications fail is evidentiary, not substantive. A litigant discovers the infringing product is still being sold, takes a screenshot on a phone, and files it as an exhibit. Under Indian evidence law, that screenshot is a computer output, and computer outputs carry a statutory precondition before a court can read them as evidence at all.
Since 1 July 2024, that precondition sits in Section 63 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (BSA), which replaced Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872 for proceedings governed by the new law. Section 63 requires a certificate, submitted along with the electronic record at each instance it is tendered, identifying the record, describing how it was produced, and confirming that the device was working properly when it created the record[3]. The certificate has to be signed by a person in charge of the device, or by an expert. Miss it, and the record is not just weak evidence. It is not evidence at all.
The Delhi High Court's 2016 order in Eli Lilly & Company & Anr. v. Maiden Pharmaceuticals Limited remains the clearest illustration of how this plays out in a trademark suit, even though it predates the BSA. The plaintiffs, mid-trial, tried to tender a certificate under Section 65-B of the erstwhile Evidence Act for electronic material they had already filed years earlier. The court asked the question every contempt applicant should ask before filing: must the certificate accompany the record from the outset, or can it follow later[4]? Relying on the Supreme Court's ruling in Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, the court accepted that the certificate could be filed later, but only if the party filing it justified the delay, and it warned that a certificate produced late without explanation risks the electronic record being kept out of evidence altogether[4].
The same rule existed, in near-identical language, in Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, the provision every reported judgment on this point before mid-2024 actually applied[5]. Little has changed about the underlying logic under the BSA. Only the section number, and a few modernised phrases, such as extending the rule to communication devices and not just computers, are new[5].
What Has Actually Worked as Evidence in Trademark Cases
Compliance with Section 63 alone does not automatically establish the authenticity or probative value of an electronic record. Courts also examine whether the record appears reliable on its face. Wherever possible, screenshots should preserve the full webpage, including the URL, browser address bar, and the date and time of capture, rather than cropped images showing only the alleged infringement. Parties should also retain the original electronic file and avoid any edits that could raise doubts about its integrity. Since online content can be altered or removed without notice, preserving multiple dated captures over time is often more persuasive than relying on a single screenshot of a dynamic webpage.
None of this makes electronic evidence unusable in trademark matters. It only means the evidence has to be handled correctly. The Delhi High Court's ex-parte decree in ATS Infrastructure Limited v. Platonic Marketing & Anr. shows the standard approach. The plaintiff's witness did not simply annex screenshots to the plaint. He proved them through an affidavit of evidence, alongside trademark registration certificates and turnover certificates, so the screenshots of the defendant's infringing website became part of a properly proved record rather than a loose printout[6]. The court accepted the unrebutted evidence and decreed the suit.
The same pattern appears in Ram Krishan & Sons Charitable Trust v. ILM Consulting Pvt. Ltd., where website printouts comparing the plaintiff's and defendant's sites, tendered through the plaintiff's witness rather than filed as bare documents, persuaded the court that the defendant's mark ILM was deceptively similar to the plaintiff's registered mark IILM[7]. In both cases, the electronic material was doing exactly the same job a photograph or a physical exhibit would do. What separated it from a rejected screenshot was proof of its origin and a witness prepared to stand behind it.
In appropriate cases, parties may also preserve webpages using recognized web archiving tools such as the Wayback Machine or Archive.today, or generate cryptographic hash values for downloaded electronic records to help demonstrate that the files have remained unaltered since capture. Where the nature or value of the dispute justifies it, notarised webpage captures or professionally preserved electronic records may provide additional assurance regarding authenticity. While such preservation methods do not by themselves establish infringement or prove contempt, they can serve as valuable corroborative material by preserving the state of online content that may later be modified or removed.
Equally important is preserving the chain of custody of the electronic record. Parties should retain the original files in the form in which they were first captured and avoid unnecessary alterations such as editing screenshots, compressing images, renaming files, or repeatedly forwarding them across devices or messaging platforms, as these processes may alter metadata or invite allegations of tampering. Maintaining the original electronic record, together with a clear record of when, how and by whom it was captured, strengthens its credibility and reduces challenges to its authenticity during the proceedings.
How Courts Have Established Disobedience After the Injunction
At the contempt stage specifically, courts have accepted a wider basket of proof than plaintiffs often expect, provided each piece is anchored to something verifiable rather than a litigant's bare word.
Third-party marketplace and directory listings carried real weight in Lords Inn Hotels and Developers Pvt. Ltd. v. S.P. Builders and Resorts Pvt. Ltd. and Ors., decided by the Bombay High Court in February 2025. The applicant showed that the respondent's hotel continued to appear under the injuncted name on booking platforms including MakeMyTrip, Goibibo and Tripadvisor more than a year after the ad-interim order. Combined with invoices a representative obtained during a visit to the hotel and a photograph of signage still bearing the mark, this was enough for the court to find willful and deliberate disobedience and impose a penalty of Rs 5 lakh[8]. What mattered was not any single screenshot but a year-long, dated pattern that a booking site's own listing history corroborated.
Affidavits that contradict themselves did similar damage in the Delhi High Court's Citigroup Inc. v. Citicorp Business and Finance Pvt. Ltd. One affidavit from the defendants claimed the infringing website had been blocked and trading under the mark had stopped. A later hearing revealed an undisclosed bank account still operating under the infringing name. The court treated the gap between what the defendants had sworn and what later surfaced as proof of continuing, deliberate violation, and sentenced a director to fifteen days of civil imprisonment[9].
Where the infringing goods are tangible, a court-appointed physical inspection carries more weight than any screenshot. In N. Ranga Rao and Sons Private Ltd. v. Mahendra T. Thakkar and Ors., the Madras High Court relied on an Advocate Commissioner's report covering inspections of premises in two states, which documented that products bearing the injuncted mark remained freely available in the market, and imposed punitive damages of Rs 2 lakh[10]. The defendants had also undertaken to disclose the volume of stock still in circulation and never did, which the court read as an admission by omission.
Building the Evidence File Before You File
A contempt application filed on the back of a strong evidence file moves faster and survives objections. Based on what courts have actually accepted, the file should include, at minimum:
A Section 63 BSA certificate, or a Section 65B certificate for matters still governed by the older Evidence Act, accompanying every screenshot, archived page or downloaded document, signed by whoever operated the device that captured it.
An affidavit of evidence from the person who took the screenshot or made the purchase, tendering the material formally rather than simply annexing it to an application.
Purchase invoices from a test purchase, ideally made through a representative rather than a party to the suit, since even a person who is not a named defendant can be independently liable for aiding a breach if they act with notice of the injunction.
An application for appointment of a Local Commissioner or Advocate Commissioner where the infringement involves physical stock, so a court officer's report replaces reliance on a litigant's own photographs.
Dated archive captures alongside live screenshots, since one screenshot proves a moment, while a court usually needs proof of a pattern of continued use over time.
That point about non-parties matters more than it might seem. Marketplace resellers and franchisees who are never named as defendants often continue selling infringing stock long after the actual defendant has complied. Indian courts, drawing on English precedent, have held that a person who is not bound by an injunction but who knowingly aids or abets its breach can be independently liable, as the Delhi High Court set out in Krishna Gupta v. Narendra Nath & Anr., discussed in this overview of third-party liability in contempt proceedings. If your evidence file shows a reseller who plainly had notice of the order, do not assume they fall outside the application simply because they were not sued in the original suit.
Common Mistakes That Sink a Contempt Plea
The primary object of Rule 2-A of Order 39 of the Code is not to punish a person, who has disobeyed the order of injunction, but to enforce the order. Willful disobedience, no doubt, invites wrath of penal action as envisaged in the said provision, hence, where any action is done in violation of an order of stay or injunction, it is the duty of the Court, as a policy, to set the wrong right and not to allow perpetuation of the wrong doing.
That is how the Madras High Court framed the purpose of the provision in N. Ranga Rao and Sons[10], and it explains most of the mistakes litigants make. First, they treat the application as automatically punitive and expect imprisonment on the first violation. Courts frequently give a defendant one more chance to comply before reaching for detention, as the Delhi High Court did in Rana Steels v. Ran India Steels Pvt. Ltd., where the defendant was found guilty of contempt for using a deceptively similar mark but was given four weeks to comply before any coercive step was taken[11].
Second, litigants file electronic evidence without any certificate and hope the defendant's silence will let it in. Both the Evidence Act line of cases and the BSA make the certificate a condition precedent, not a formality that an admission can cure[4].
Third, litigants assume a single screenshot proves a pattern. It proves a moment. Courts want to see that the violation continued over a meaningful stretch of time, which is why the year-long, multi-source record in Lords Inn Hotels succeeded[8] where thinner applications, built on a handful of undated screenshots, tend to fail at the threshold.
What Happens Once the Court Finds Contempt
Relief under Order XXXIX Rule 2A is flexible, and Indian courts have used most of that range in trademark matters: monetary penalties payable to the injured party, ranging from Rs 2 lakh in N. Ranga Rao[10] to Rs 5 lakh in both Louis Vuitton[1] and Lords Inn Hotels[8]; civil imprisonment of company directors, fifteen days in Citigroup[9]; and structural orders such as striking a company off the register, attaching bank accounts and directing a domain name to be transferred to the trademark owner. None of this follows automatically. Every one of these outcomes, in the cases discussed here, followed a court that was persuaded by evidence it could actually rely on.
Proceedings under Order XXXIX Rule 2A are serious as they may result in detention or attachment, yet the Court is not conducting a criminal trial. The focus remains whether disobedience of the Court's order is established on reliable evidence.
Order XXXIX Rule 2A carries, in the words of one commentator, some trappings of punitive measures even though its primary purpose is enforcement, which is exactly why courts read the evidence of disobedience narrowly and strictly before reaching for a penalty. That gap between what the rule intends and how carefully courts apply it in practice is why the quality of your electronic evidence, and not the strength of your trademark, usually decides whether a contempt plea succeeds.
💡 Realistic Timeline for a Contempt Order
Realistic Timeline for an Order XXXIX Rule 2A Application
Litigants often expect that filing an application under Order XXXIX Rule 2A will immediately result in attachment of property or detention in civil prison. In reality, proceedings under the Rule ordinarily progress in stages. The Court will first satisfy itself that a prima facie case of disobedience exists by issuing notice to the respondent, considering the reply, and examining the material placed on record. Where the alleged breach is disputed, the Court may permit additional affidavits, call for further documentary or electronic evidence, or appoint a Local Commissioner before reaching a conclusion on whether the injunction has been knowingly violated. Coercive measures are generally considered only after the Court is satisfied that the breach is deliberate, continuing, and supported by reliable evidence. Consequently, the duration of the proceedings depends not on any fixed timeline but on factors such as the complexity of the dispute, the nature of the alleged breach, the conduct of the parties, and, above all, the quality of the evidence produced.
Seeking Interim Directions During the Pendency of the Application
An application under Order XXXIX Rule 2A should not always be viewed solely as a route to punitive action. Where the alleged violation is ongoing and continues to undermine the Court's injunction, it may be appropriate to seek interim directions to prevent further prejudice pending adjudication of the application. Depending on the facts, the Court may be requested to direct preservation of electronic evidence, appoint a Local Commissioner to document the continuing breach, require disclosure of relevant records, or pass appropriate directions to prevent further use of the infringing mark on websites, online marketplaces, social media platforms, or in physical trade channels. Such relief is intended to preserve the effectiveness of the original injunction and prevent the dispute from becoming irreversible while the Court determines whether the respondent has committed a breach.
