Sony Entertainment Television's 'Shark Tank India' faces legal issues over alleged trademark violations

Sony Entertainment Television's 'Shark Tank India', launched in 2021 and now in its third season, continues to face controversies. The latest brawl involves the founder of nutritional food brand Fit & Flex, who accused the chain of unfairly targeting her for trademark violations, The Indian Express reported.

Pathik Patel, the founder of Fit & Flex, has reportedly sent a legal notice to the channel, alleging that Sony Entertainment Television suspended his advertising account without due cause. In a LinkedIn post, Patel expressed his frustration, saying: “I feel really sad to see this, but I also had no choice! It's been 50 days without any D2C activity and all we hear is “We won't do anything.” We recently aired on Shark Tank S3 on March 15th, which was a dream come true, but what followed turned into a nightmare. Despite our joy at being featured on national television, our happiness was short-lived.”

Sony's Alleged Unfair Targeting of Patel for Trademark InfringementHis post read: “They removed our social media posts containing clips from the Shark Tank episode and blocked our advertising account, unpublished our Facebook page, and disabled the collaboration feature on our brand account as well as on my account”. “Ideally, we aired the episode, which we could use for marketing purposes for 3 months from that date (per their guidelines), but our content was removed within 25 days, after which we ceased to stream all Shark Tank clips on organic and paid posts,” Patel posted.

Patel said Fit & Flex continued its efforts to resolve the issue, without success. “We have since written daily to Meta and Sony to help us find a solution, but we have received no resolution. We don't want to use clips for marketing purposes and just want to get our original accounts back. All we want is for someone from the SONY team to talk to us and help us resolve this issue amicably, but unfortunately neither party (Sony Legal or Shark Tank) has chosen to respond . Not only me, but more than 70 brands are facing these challenges. While we were shown a bigger picture of up to 5x and 7x growth, the Shark Tank experiment actually left us with a huge loss of business and a drop of almost 10x to 12x. »

Patel expressed his disappointment as the founder of Fit and Flex, saying it was extremely discouraging to see that the mainstream media is harassing startups.

Although he didn't get a deal on the show, Patel's experience with “Shark Tank India” was difficult. It came under intense scrutiny from Justices Deepinder Goyal and Anupam Mittal. Reflecting on his experience, he shared on LinkedIn: “But as they say… partial knowledge is always more dangerous than NO knowledge! A 15 minute edited video can only highlight this and will therefore use my platforms to debunk some popular myths! As a health conscious athlete and foodie, I have always been very sincere and true to my brand philosophy and I will not let a 15 minute clip raise questions about 5 years of hard work from me and my crew.

He concluded with a note on his entrepreneurial journey, saying, “As I continue on this entrepreneurial path, I carry with me the lessons learned from my Shark Tank India experience. It’s not just about looking for investments; it's about seizing opportunities, overcoming challenges and never losing sight of the passion that fuels our journey.