High Court grants appeal in complex Kiwi case.

 

Tiri Group, the parent company of Winc NZ, has been granted the right to appeal a High Court injunction against its use of NetXpress trademarks and their variants online.

 

At a hearing in October last year, Winc Australia sued NXP Holdings and NXP Ltd as well as their owner, Tiri Group, to secure its rights to various ‘NetXpress’ trademarks.

 

Winc won an interim injunction against the three respondents, forcing them to stop using the marks, which covered, among other things, retail and wholesale mail and electronic ordering and distribution.

 

For NXP, which acquired Winc NZ last year, to be viable as a stand-alone business, it was necessary for it to separate Winc's Australian and New Zealand e-commerce platforms, according to a report in Reseller News New Zealand. 

 

The now separate Winc Australia and NXP entered into a transitional agreement allowing NXP to use Winc-owned brands and domains for 12 months while NXP changed its branding.

 

The High Court has now, however, granted NXP’s application for leave to appeal and issued an order staying the execution of the injunctions granted until further order of the Court of Appeal.

 

"Having determined that there are arguable errors both of general or public importance or otherwise of sufficient importance to NXP to outweigh the lack of any general or precedential importance, I consider it follows, as a matter of course in this case, that it is in the interests of justice to grant leave to appeal," Justice Christine Gordon wrote in her judgment.