Derek Achong

An on­line re­al es­tate com­pa­ny has lost its law­suit against a new com­peti­tor over the unau­tho­rised use of its lo­go and name in its ini­tial mar­ket­ing cam­paign.

De­liv­er­ing a judg­ment, late last week, High Court Judge Devin­dra Ram­per­sad dis­missed My Bunch of Keys Re­al­ty Lim­it­ed’s law­suit against Mav­er­ick Tech­nolo­gies Lim­it­ed in which it was al­leg­ing copy­right in­fringe­ment, un­fair com­pe­ti­tion, defama­tion, and ma­li­cious false­hood.

My Bunch of Keys Re­al­ty’s law­suit cen­tred around a Pow­er­Point pre­sen­ta­tion de­liv­ered at the pre-launch of Mav­er­ick’s “Res­i­dence CRM” sys­tem at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel in Port-of-Spain in Sep­tem­ber 2019.

The com­pa­ny claimed its ri­val’s pre­sen­ta­tion, fea­tur­ing its name and lo­go, con­tained in­cor­rect and/or dis­parag­ing and/or false in­for­ma­tion about it and specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed its clients or agents.

While Jus­tice Ram­per­sad ruled there was no doubt the com­pa­ny’s lo­go and trade­mark were used with­out its per­mis­sion, he had to de­ter­mine whether it could pur­sue lit­i­ga­tion over the al­leged breach of its copy­right rights.

In rul­ing the com­pa­ny could not pur­sue the case over the breach of its prop­er­ty rights, Jus­tice Ram­per­sad not­ed that the com­pa­ny failed to pro­vide any ev­i­dence of the in­di­vid­ual who cre­at­ed the lo­go on its be­half, prop­er­ly as­sign­ing his copy­right rights to it. He not­ed that Sec­tion 28 of the Copy­right Act re­quires the as­sign­ment to be in writ­ing.

“The court, there­fore, holds that the claimant has no prop­er­ty rights in the copy­right rights in light of the in­ef­fec­tive as­sign­ment,” he said.

He al­so said it could not claim com­pen­sa­tion for breach of the Trade Marks Act as it failed to prop­er­ly reg­is­ter it un­der the process pre­scribed in the leg­is­la­tion.

Jus­tice Ram­per­sad re­ject­ed the com­pa­ny’s com­plaint that Mav­er­ick breached the Pro­tec­tion Against Un­fair Com­pe­ti­tion Act by re­fer­ring to a list of ser­vices it claimed My Bunch of Keys Re­al­ty did not pro­vide dur­ing the pre­sen­ta­tion to clients.

In mak­ing the claim, the com­pa­ny con­tend­ed that Mav­er­ick sought to dis­cred­it it to pro­mote its ser­vice.

Mav­er­ick de­nied any wrong­do­ing, as it claimed it prop­er­ly re­flect­ed the ac­tu­al ser­vices pro­vid­ed by its ri­val to al­low at­ten­dees to make an in­formed choice.

Jus­tice Ram­per­sad not­ed that the com­pa­ny failed to pro­duce ev­i­dence to prove Mav­er­ick mis­rep­re­sent­ed the ser­vices it pro­vid­ed.

“On a bal­ance of prob­a­bil­i­ties, the claimant was un­able to prove that the ten ser­vices iden­ti­fied in para­graph five of the state­ment of case were in fact avail­able from the claimant at the time that the pre­sen­ta­tion was done in 2019 to ren­der those state­ments made the de­fen­dant in the com­par­i­son pre­sen­ta­tion to be un­true,” he said.

Jus­tice Ram­per­sad dis­missed the defama­tion as­pect of the law­suit based on the com­pa­ny’s fail­ure to prove Mav­er­ick’s pre­sen­ta­tion was mis­lead­ing, false, or ma­li­cious­ly done.

De­spite Mav­er­ick’s le­gal vic­to­ry, Jus­tice Ram­per­sad or­dered it to bear their own le­gal costs, as it failed to file wit­ness state­ments in a counter-claim against My Bunch of Keys Re­al­ty, which was al­so dis­missed.