India: Intellectual Property

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the production, reproduction and dissemination of creative works, as well as posing intricate challenges for copyright law. A major type of synthetic media, deepfakes also pose further issues regarding copyright violations, personality rights, privacy concerns, and intermediary liability.

When a generative tool can produce a product's shape, packaging, or interface in seconds, the older assumptions behind design law start to strain. This piece asks who counts as the author or applicant when a human prompt and a machine's output are combined, what that combination does to novelty searches and disclosure risk, how ownership is actually allocated in AI platform contracts, and why a design registration is refused, or granted, in ways that copyright and patent protection are not.

When an artificial intelligence system is trained on copyrighted news content, and later answers a user’s question using what it learned, has the law been broken? On 24th July 2026, the Delhi High Court answered that question, at least for now. In ANI Media Pvt. Ltd. v. Open AI OpCo LLC, Justice Amit Bansal declined to grant an interim injunction against OpenAI, holding, on a prima facie, interim stage view, that the company’s use of ANI’s news content to train its large language models (“LLMs”) falls within the fair dealing exception under Section 52(1)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957

Any business that uses copyrighted music in India, whether in a mobile application, digital platform, live event, broadcast, or commercial production, must obtain authorisation from the relevant copyright holders. In India, there are two primary routes through which this authorisation can be obtained: (i) a direct licence negotiated with and granted by the rights holder (or its authorised representative), or (ii) a licence obtained through a registered copyright society that administers the rights of multiple owners on a collective basis.

The article discusses the role of GCCs as an indirect investment channel into the innovation ecosystem. Observing that GCCs have become strategic innovation hubs that identify, engage, validate, and scale emerging technologies developed by Indian startups before a formal investment relationship is established, the author discusses the Key legal and regulatory considerations.

Intellectual property portfolios can be destroyed not by litigation or competition, but by a single missed renewal deadline. A patent that survived years of prosecution or a trademark built over decades can vanish because an annuity payment went unpaid on a date nobody was watching. This examination reveals how these administrative failures occur under Indian statute, why restoration is far weaker than most proprietors assume, and what a defensible renewal framework looks like in practice.

When a generative tool can produce a product's shape, packaging, or interface in seconds, the older assumptions behind design law start to strain. This piece asks who counts as the author or applicant when a human prompt and a machine's output are combined, what that combination does to novelty searches and disclosure risk, how ownership is actually allocated in AI platform contracts, and why a design registration is refused, or granted, in ways that copyright and patent protection are not.

India’s semiconductor ambitions are usually discussed in terms of fabs, packaging units, and PLI-linked investment. Less visible, but equally important for companies actually designing chips, is the legal regime that protects the layout itself — the specific arrangement of transistors, interconnects, and circuit elements that makes a chip work and that took months (or years) of design effort to create.

In a recent decision in Manash Kamal Bezboruah vs. Bokahola Tea Company Private Limited [2026 INSC 701], the Supreme Court of India ("Supreme Court"), reiterated that the supervisory jurisdiction of High Courts under Article 227 of the Constitution of India, though not ousted by the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 ("Arbitration Act"), must be exercised with extreme circumspection against orders passed by an arbitral tribunal under Section 16 of the Arbitration Act. The Supreme Court held that where an arbitral tribunal rejects a jurisdictional objection, interlocutory interference under Article 227 is warranted only in the exceptional situation of a patent lack of inherent jurisdiction, and the ordinary remedy lies under Section 34 after the final award.

Every startup founder believes their idea is special. That belief is usually what gets them out of bed at 5 a.m. to code before their day job, or what convinces them to max out a credit card on their first prototype.

But by the time a term sheet lands on the table, “later” has usually already arrived, and it arrives at the worst possible moment: during due diligence, when an investor’s lawyers are combing through every contract, every repository, and every line of ownership history

Generative Artificial Intelligence (“GenAI”) represents a paradigm shift in the corporate technology landscape, evolving in a remarkably short period from an employee productivity tool to a significant concern...