India: Copyright

India has emerged as one of the world’s leading destinations for Global Capability Centres (GCCs), with multinational corporations increasingly establishing captive centres to manage global operations, technology development, research and development, finance, legal support, data analytics and business process management functions.

Personality rights have become an increasingly important area of Indian intellectual property law in recent years.

Can a pharmaceutical giant's two-decade-old brand name ‘A TO Z' command exclusive rights over those three terms in the multivitamin market? And what happens when a smaller competitor enters with a composite mark containing the same alphabetical endpoints, embedded within an entirely different word?

Zee Entertainment has filed a lawsuit against Nykaa for using copyrighted songs in Instagram reels without proper commercial licensing, seeking $200,000 in damages. The case highlights a critical gap in how brands use social media music libraries: while Instagram permits personal use of licensed music, commercial content requires separate synchronisation licenses that most brands fail to obtain.

Nearly three years ago, we wrote about the “hope” for GUI registration under Indian design laws, drawing upon the then-nascent jurisprudence emerging from the Hon’ble Calcutta High Court in UST Global (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. vs. The Controller of Patents and Designs .

Conducting a pre-launch Intellectual Property (IP) risk audit is essential for a smooth entry into the Indian market, where “first-to-file” rules and local common law nuances...

Justice Ronnie Abrams granted Netflix's motion to dismiss the complaint, finding that Shah failed to establish ownership of the 2009 Hindi film Luck and its screenplay, and that, in any event, Luck and Squid Game are not substantially similar.

In a significant intellectual property ruling delivered in August 2025, the Bombay High Court in Sunil S/o Darshan Saberwal vs Star India Pvt. Ltd. & Ors. 2025: BHC-OS:13777 reaffirmed a foundational principle of Indian Copyright Law that a film title, by itself, is not entitled to copyright protection under the Copyright Act, 1957. While disputes over titles are common in the entertainment industry, courts have consistently resisted attempts to monopolize titles through copyright claims.

What began as a small test system has turned into a standard tool and artificial intelligence now props up almost every big industry. Programs like ChatGPT, NVIDIA ACE, Harvey and a growing list of rivals have changed what people mean by “creativity,” because the same programs now handle research, help shoot films plus compose songs - work that once came only from human minds.