While considering a suit filed by Christian Louboutin SAS (first plaintiff) and Clermon ET Associes, France (second plaintiff) over its distinctive and well-known red sole shoes against the M/s Shoe Boutique (defendant), a partnership firm which is involved in the manufacture and sale of shoes, the Delhi High Court refused to rely on chatGPT responses and held that there has been a clear intention to imitate and gain monetarily on the strength of the reputation and goodwill of the Plaintiffs.

The High Court clarified that the products of the Defendant are knock-offs or look-alikes of the Plaintiffs’ distinctive shoes and footwear, and that they had copied all the essential features of the Plaintiff’s footwear such as ‘RED SOLE’, ‘SPIKED SHOE STYLE’, as also the prints.

Noticing that the imitation by the Defendants was nothing more but an attempt to pass off its own goods as the goods of the Plaintiffs, a Single Judge Bench of Justice Pratibha M. Singh observed that “Accuracy and reliability of Al generated data is still in the grey area. There is no doubt in the mind of the Court that, at the present stage of technological development, Al cannot substitute either the human intelligence or the humane element in the adjudicatory process. At best the tool could be utilised for a preliminary understanding or for preliminary research and nothing more”.

Advocate Pravin Anand appeared for the Plaintiff, whereas Advocate Siddhartha Luthra appeared for the Defendant.

The brief facts of the case were that the Plaintiffs are entities existing in France and stated to have opened their first shop in 1991 in Paris. The Plaintiffs are known for the well-known ‘RED SOLE’ shoes which are manufactured and sold by them. They transferred the rights in intellectual property of Christian Louboutin to second Plaintiff. It was claimed that ‘RED SOLE’ on heeled shoes is a signature design of the Plaintiffs which is also registered as a trademark. The case of the Plaintiffs is that the Plaintiffs’ products with the unique designs have been sold in India since February, 2012. Apart from the ‘RED SOLE’ shoe, the Plaintiffs are stated to have also adopted and created a new unique ‘SPIKED SHOE STYLE’ with spike patterns, and they have adopted the ‘SPIKED SHOE STYLE’ in around 2010. The claim of the Plaintiffs is that the ‘SPIKED SHOE STYLE’ is inherently distinctive and the same can be instantly recognised as emanating from the Plaintiffs alone. The case of the Plaintiffs is that the Defendant firm is a partnership firm of the Makkar family and is manufacturing identically designed shoes with the same get up, and a comparison of the shoes shows that the Defendant has identically copied the shoe designs.

After considering the submission, the Bench recognizes a monopoly in favour of the Plaintiff for all Spiked shoes or coloured soles, and stated that the impugned products ought to be a colourable or a slavish imitation of the Plaintiff’s get-up and designs for an injunction to be granted.

When different questions were put on CHAT GPT, the Bench considered the answers emerged out of it and said that responses from ChatGPT as also the one relied upon by the Plaintiffs shows that the said tool cannot be the basis of adjudication of legal or factual issues in a court of law.

The Bench went on to observe that the response of a Large Language Model (LLM) based chatbots such as ChatGPT, which is sought to be relied upon by the counsel for Plaintiff, depends upon a host of factors including the nature and structure of query put by the user and the training data, and that there are possibilities of incorrect responses, fictional case laws, imaginative data etc. generated by AI chatbots.

Accordingly, considering the comparative chart of a large variety of product designs which have been imitated by the Defendant, the Bench concluded that there has been a clear intention to imitate and gain monetarily on the strength of the reputation and goodwill of the Plaintiffs.

Hence, the High Court decreed the suit and directed that the Defendant shall abide by the undertaking that it shall not copy or imitate any of the designs of the Plaintiffs’ shoes.

If any breach of this undertaking is found, the Defendant would be liable to pay a lump sum amount of Rs.25 lakhs as damages to the Plaintiffs immediately upon such evidence coming to notice of the Plaintiffs, added the Court.

Cause Title: Christian Louboutin SAS and Anr. v. Shoe Boutique – SHUTIQ [Neutral Citation: 2023: DHC: 6090]

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Delhi High CourtJustice Pratibha M. Singh

Pankaj Bajpai