Claim No: IP-2022-000086 - [2024] EWHC 1430 (IPEC)

In her witness evidence Ms Gupta refers to using LinkedIn posts for ‘free advertising’. She says that the main LinkedIn page is called Builder.ai and has over 240,000 followers, with posts going up about 4 times a week, mostly with the Claimant’s trade marks in them. A number of those have been exhibited to her witness statement and I have looked at them. Ms Gupta clarified in cross-examination that the 240,000 figure is the number of followers for the Claimant’s LinkedIn page at the time she wrote her witness statement, i.e. in 2024, but that had grown over time from “a very, very small number” in 2021. It has not provided any evidence of the number of LinkedIn followers in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Ms Gupta accepted in cross-examination that the LinkedIn posts the Claimant relies on do not appear to have many interactions with them, in terms of comments or reposts, but said that she would not expect engagement on posts that were merely informative, for example those that simply inform the public that the Claimant will be at a certain tech event. She said that she considered it “lucky” if a LinkedIn post got more than 100 or 200 interactions, but many had considerably less. Ms Gupta accepted in cross-examination that the Claimant had not provided any disclosure of the geographical location of its 240,000 LinkedIn followers, although it could have provided data breaking that down, as Mr Girdhar had done in respect of the Defendants’ LinkedIn Post complained of.

Similarly, in relation to the blog posts relied on from the Claimant’s website, the Claimant has not provided any figures at all for how many of those who interact with or read those blog posts are from the UK. Ms Gupta accepted in cross-examination that many of those posts are reporting on tech events abroad and it seems to me that there may be little interest in the UK in reports of events in Helsinki or Dubai. I have no metrics in relation to those events, as previously mentioned.