In an ongoing copyright infringement dispute, IndiaMart has filed false and fabricated documents in court, following a request for investigation into the database firm.
On Friday(July 16, 2021), a division bench of Justice Sunil Deshmukh and Justice Abhay Ahuja directed Just Dial, its founder VSS Mani, and other board members to file their response to the B2B company's petition and set the next hearing for July 30, 2021.
In the application, BSE-listed IndiaMart claimed that the documents were filed by Just Dial without a certificate under Section 65B of the Evidence Act, which was a requirement for the admission of any electronic records, because the company had not described how it obtained the documents.
Senior advocate Abad Ponda, who represented IndiaMart in the case alongside DSK Legal's Vikrant Singh Negi, confirmed the filing of the intervention application. Just Dial did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is the latest in a series of petitions and cross-petitions filed by the two companies against each other in the Bombay and Delhi high courts, as well as before the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal.
Last year(2020),IndiaMart filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Justdial's JD Mart B2B platform, alleging that it copied its website compilations.
In its most recent intervention application, IndiaMart claimed that the rival company fabricated evidence before the court and used it to claim that IndiaMart was deleting or altering data from its website. According to the petition, this claim is "absolutely incorrect and misleading this court in an attempt to obtain interim relief."
In the petition, IndiaMart requested that Google India be made a party to the case so that the court could verify its claim on the website data.
