A logo dispute between a Bangalore fintech company and one of the world’s largest IT services corporations has produced one of this year’s more detailed rulings on copyright access and reverse passing off. The Bombay High Court, in an order pronounced on 7th July 2026, declined to restrain Cognizant Technology Solutions from using its blue hexagonal device mark despite Atyati Technologies Private Limited claiming that the mark reproduced its own orange hexagonal ATYATI logo.
Introduction
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Justice Sharmila U Deshmukh dismissed the interim application in Commercial IP Suit No. 613 of 2025, holding that Cognizant had prima facie demonstrated independent creation and that Atyati had not shown a reasonable opportunity of access, a standard the Court distinguished sharply from a bare possibility of access. The order also breaks new ground by disagreeing with the Delhi High Court on whether reverse passing off is a cognisable claim under Indian trademark law.
The Rebranding That Sparked the Dispute
Atyati Technologies has used the word mark ATYATI since 2008 and describes itself as a fintech company offering last mile financial inclusion technology, loan origination systems and business correspondent services largely to public sector and regional rural banks. In 2019 the company undertook a rebranding exercise and adopted an orange hexagonal honeycomb device, pleaded as a stylised depiction of the letter C representing collaboration, compassion and impact, tilted slightly upward to signify growth.
Cognizant, the New Jersey headquartered technology consulting giant, separately embarked on its own brand refresh. According to its pleadings, the company engaged Wise Branding Group in Florida, which in turn retained designer Orna Navon and contractor Nertil Muhaxhiri between December 2020 and April 2021 to develop a new visual identity. The process reportedly ran through four logo concepts internally labelled Gradient, Compass, Jumble and Code, tested through a market survey across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Australia in February and March 2021, before the Gradient concept, a blue hexagonal C shaped device, was selected. Cognizant says it spent close to seventeen crore rupees on the exercise.
Atyati claims it discovered Cognizant’s logo only in October 2023 and issued a cease and desist notice on 30th October 2023, which Cognizant refused to comply with. The suit followed on 4th March 2024, and an ex parte ad interim injunction granted on 19th March 2024 set off a winding procedural journey. A single judge declined to continue that relief in June 2024, a Division Bench restored it in August 2025, and the matter reached the Supreme Court, which directed that the interim application be decided on its own merits. That is the application the Bombay High Court has now dismissed.
Copyright Ownership and the Question of Access
The Court first addressed whether Atyati even owned copyright in its logo, since Cognizant had argued that the ATYATI device was itself derived from an earlier hexagonal mark used since 2015 by a Spanish company, Atresmedia Hub Factory. Justice Deshmukh rejected this defence at the threshold, observing that the existence of a similar logo somewhere in the world does not by itself defeat a claim to originality unless there is proof of actual copying rather than mere chronological priority. On this narrow point Atyati succeeded, and the Court accepted that it prima facie owned copyright in its hexagonal device. Practitioners advising clients on securing their own claim to ownership over house marks and logo devices, particularly around registration timelines and evidentiary weight, may find our earlier piece on the evidentiary value of copyright registration in ownership disputes useful background reading.
The harder question was whether Cognizant had copied the Atyati logo, and here the judgment turns almost entirely on the concept of access. Atyati argued that Cognizant’s overwhelming Indian workforce, close to seventy percent of its roughly 350,000 employees according to submissions, created a reasonable likelihood that someone within the organisation was aware of the Atyati logo and could have conveyed it to the designers working in the United States. The Court was unpersuaded. It held that the sheer scale of a multinational corporation itself suggests a segregation of departments, and it is not realistic to infer that Indian employees in unrelated functions had any channel to influence a rebranding exercise conducted by an external design agency abroad. The Court further noted that the gap between Atyati adopting its logo in 2019 and Cognizant’s design process beginning in December 2020 was too short a window to establish that the designers had a genuine opportunity to encounter the Atyati mark. Citing Nimmer on Copyright, the Court repeated the principle that access cannot rest on mere speculation and requires a reasonable possibility of viewing the copyrighted work, not a bare theoretical one.
How Cognizant Proved Independent Creation
Having found no material to establish access, the Court turned to Cognizant’s affirmative case of independent creation, and this is where the order becomes a useful template for how design defendants should build their evidentiary record. Cognizant placed on record a Master Services Agreement with Wise Branding dating back to 2018, a retainer agreement with Orna Navon from November 2020, time entry logs recording hundreds of hours of design work between December 2020 and April 2021, a detailed market survey report evaluating four distinct logo concepts, and subsequent brand guideline documents from 2021, 2022 and 2024. The Court described this as voluminous persuasive documentation and remarked that it would be unfathomable for a party to undertake such an elaborate, costly and thoroughly documented process of refinement if its real intention was simply to copy an existing mark. This finding echoes broader principles on how courts weigh circumstantial proof of copying, a theme explored at greater length in our earlier analysis of copyright infringement principles under Indian law.
Atyati’s counsel pointed to inconsistencies, including a designer affidavit describing work between 2021 and 2022 while time sheets showed entries starting in December 2020, and argued that none of the documents specifically referenced the impugned logo itself. The Court accepted that the detailed conceptual brief was not separately documented but held that the emergence of four distinct design directions by March 2021, tested through an international survey, was itself strong evidence that the creative process began independently and progressed on its own trajectory rather than being reverse engineered from Atyati’s mark.
The Reverse Passing Off Question
Beyond copyright, Atyati pressed a passing off claim built on the doctrine of reverse passing off, the theory that a much larger junior user can so dominate a market that consumers come to associate the senior user’s own goodwill with the junior user instead. This required the Court to confront a split in judicial opinion, since the Delhi High Court in Western Digital Technologies Inc v Geonix International Pvt Ltd had earlier held that reverse passing off has no place in Indian trademark jurisprudence. Justice Deshmukh respectfully disagreed, relying on the Bombay High Court’s own earlier decision in Sheila Mahendra Thakkar v Mahesh Naranji Thakkar, which treated reverse passing off as simply another form of actionable misrepresentation rather than a distinct standalone tort. The Court reasoned that Section 27(2) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999 protects against passing off of goods or services as belonging to another person without limiting the direction of that misrepresentation, so a scenario where a defendant’s dominance causes the plaintiff’s own goods to be perceived as connected to the defendant falls within its scope. This aspect of the ruling is significant well beyond the immediate parties, since it gives Indian courts outside Delhi a reasoned basis to entertain reverse passing off claims going forward. Readers interested in how courts assess whether two marks are close enough to cause genuine confusion, as opposed to superficial resemblance that does not rise to infringement, may want to revisit our earlier discussion on why similar trademarks are not always infringing.
Having settled the doctrinal question in Atyati’s favour, the Court nonetheless ruled against it on the facts. Atyati’s difficulty was that it had built its entire commercial identity, and the revenue figures placed before the Court, around the composite ATYATI mark and never used the hexagonal device as a standalone identifier. The Court held that the word ATYATI, adopted in 2008 and used continuously since, remained the leading and essential feature of the mark, while the logo, introduced only in 2019, had not independently acquired the kind of instant recognition that a mark like the Nike swoosh enjoys apart from its word mark. Without standalone goodwill in the logo alone, the passing off claim, reverse or otherwise, could not succeed.
Sophisticated Buyers and the Absence of Confusion
The Court also drew a sharp line between the two companies’ actual businesses. Atyati serves public sector and regional rural banks through specialised fintech products aimed at financial inclusion, while Cognizant serves Fortune 500 corporations and global enterprises through large scale IT consulting engagements. Applying the Supreme Court’s guidance in Cadila Health Care Ltd v Cadila Pharmaceuticals Ltd on assessing deceptive similarity, and drawing on the Bombay High Court’s own recent reasoning in Gensol Electric Vehicles Pvt Ltd v Mahindra Last Mile Mobility Ltd, Justice Deshmukh held that procurement decisions for enterprise IT services are made by chief information officers and dedicated procurement committees who exercise considerable diligence, unlike impulse purchases of everyday consumer goods. Given this gulf in customer sophistication, scale and price point, the Court found no realistic likelihood that a buyer would mistake one company’s services for the other’s, whichever direction the alleged misrepresentation ran.
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Conclusion
This order rewards careful documentation over chronological bragging rights, and that shift deserves attention from every brand owner currently sitting on a rebranding project. Cognizant did not win because its logo looked sufficiently different, the Court itself acknowledged real visual resemblance between the two hexagonal devices, it won because it could produce a paper trail stretching from an early services agreement through to time sheets, survey data and brand guideline decks that made the story of independent creation credible years after the fact.
Companies investing serious money into a new visual identity would do well to treat that process the way Cognizant apparently did, as something to be documented contemporaneously rather than reconstructed defensively once litigation arrives. On the doctrinal side, the Court’s willingness to part ways with the Delhi High Court and recognise reverse passing off as a legitimate extension of ordinary passing off principles is a welcome contribution to a genuinely underdeveloped corner of Indian trademark law, even though it did not help Atyati on these particular facts.
