Sound Board

Our thoughts and views on the practice of Intellectual Property in India and around the world.

In the world of construction, an architect holds a remarkable position. An architect quite often turns to be the ultimate decision maker on any project, a question then arises would that give, the architect, as the creator and legal ‘author’ of a building a ‘right to object’ to the modification or destruction of their work by the owner of the building? In a recent judgment, the Delhi High Court has answered the question in negative.

The Intellectual Property Appellate Board recently held hearings for trademark matters in July 2019. The cause list was sent on a rather short notice, and came as a surprise to many advocates since the IPAB currently doesn’t have a technical member for trademarks, and therefore should not be hearing trademark matters under the law. We’ll be taking a look at this in closer detail in this post.

The current case is a classic story of conscious copying of the domain name. Before proceeding further, dealing with the meaning and definition of the word domain name is important. Domain name is the name of the website. In simple words, just like how every person is attributed with a specific and unique name, similarly, the websites too have a name of their own! And this ‘name’ is called as the Domain Name.

The Indian Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade issued a public notice on June 24, 2019, along with a draft guideline for comments from stakeholders (within 30 days) on the peppy tagline “Invaluable Treasure of Incredible India” and a common tri-color logo for GI certified products.

In a recent judgement, the Delhi High Court set a precedent by issuing India’s first-ever ‘dynamic injunction’ against websites who were deemed to be infringing upon the rights of copyright holders.

With the advancement of technology and the expansion of the grey-market, brands worldwide are currently facing a large-scale import and export of infringing/false & counterfeit goods. Accordingly, to stop the illegal import/export of the counterfeit goods and products into the Indian market, the government has taken strict steps and bought in new amendments in getting the IP registered with the Customs Authority.

A classic examples of legal fakes is the case of Supreme Italia, a company that has established its presence depending solely on the concept of legal fakes. The strategy that was adopted by the brand was to simply target the less informed customers into believing that it was dealing in products that were from the original brand Supreme.

Privacy (and particularly data privacy) has become a major talking point over the last few years. With the exponential growth in digitization of services and expanded surveillance capabilities (both government and the private sector), more and more citizens around the world have pushed for governments to legislate strong privacy controls.

The name Adidas is not new, and neither are its products. But in a major twist and what appears to be a blow, the European Court has ruled that the “three stripes” brand/trademark of Adidas was not distinctive enough.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most significant pieces of legislation in any sector that has been enacted in recent years. Since its enforcement in May 2018, the GDPR has already seen a critical transformation in the way that various organizations store, handle, and process user data. We’ve provided an overview of the GDPR and some of its key features in an earlier post, which can be seen here. In this post, we’ll be examining some of the key…