On October 16, 2019 the Advocate General (AG) of the European Court of Justice rendered an opinion in Sky Plc & Ors v. Sky Kick UK Ltd. & Anr. (“the Sky case”) in a reference by Justice Arnold of the England and Wales High Court (Chancery Division).
The AG’s opinion caught my attention because the opinion as well as the facts of the case resonated the 1996 order of the Indian Supreme Court in Vishnu Das Trading v. Vazir Sultan Tobacco Ltd., famously known to IP lawyers as “the Charminar case”. While AG’s opinions are only advisory in nature, statistics indicate that courts largely follow the same in arriving at a final judgement.
Let’s examine what makes these two cases similar.