This Week in IP

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Drafting credit: Divya Telang, Research Associate

Weekly IPR Update | 27 July 2026 – 02 August 2026

Bombay High Court Rejects Broad Protection for Partial Brand Words

The Bombay High Court dismissed a rectification petition filed by Aravind Laboratories seeking to cancel the registration of a “DIVYAM” device mark.1 The Court ruled that owning the registered trademark “EYETEX DIVYA” for kumkum products does not give the company exclusive ownership over the standalone word “DIVYA” or its variants under Section 17 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. The court emphasized that the brand’s primary distinctiveness comes from the dominant prefix “EYETEX”, and granting rights over partial, generic components would set a precedent allowing businesses to monopolize common terms. Furthermore, the court found no visual, structural, or phonetic likelihood of consumer confusion, noting that the “DIVYAM” mark features a stylized flame design with the tagline “Your Complete Divinity Store” for pooja items, whereas Aravind Laboratories operates in the cosmetics segment. Further, the court held that Aravind Laboratories failed to qualify as an “aggrieved person” under Sections 47 and 57 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999.2 Read more here.

Delhi High Court Bars Gujarati Newspaper From using ‘Aaj Tak’ Name

The Delhi High Court overturned a 2012 trial court order to permanently restrain a Rajkot-based newspaper from operating under the name “Saurashtra Aaj Tak”, establishing that TV Today Network is the prior user of the well-known “Aaj Tak” mark.3 Justice Mini Pushkarna held that the lower court erred by allowing the newspaper to continue using the title with a disclaimer, noting that all key elements of a passing-off claim, that is, goodwill, misrepresentation, and damage were fully established. The High Court observed that simply adding the regional prefix “Saurashtra” failed to distinguish the publication and instead falsely implied a regional division of TV Today’s media operations. Rejecting the trial court’s finding of bona fide conduct due to a lack of supporting evidence, the High Court issued permanent and mandatory injunctions directing the Gujarat based newspaper to adopt an entirely distinct name that bears no deceptive similarity to “Aaj Tak”.4 Read more here.

No Notice, No Removal: Kerala High Court Shields Trademark Owner Over Registrar’s Procedural Oversight

The Kerala High Court allowed a writ petition filed by the proprietor of Vayalar Invention Centre, whose application to renew his “VIC” trademark was rejected by the Trademark Registry due to its expiration of registration in 2015.5 The Court held that the authorities could not legally deny renewal or remove a trademark from the register without first fulfilling the mandatory statutory obligation under Section 25(3) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, and Rule 58 of the Trade Marks Rules, 2017, which requires sending a formal pre-expiration notice (Form O-3/RG-3) to the registered owner. Despite the registry’s portal flagging the mark as “likely to be removed”, the petitioner’s online renewal was not accepted.  On the same day the petitioner’s subsequent offline renewal application and ₹10,000 fee, was also rejected by the Registry which stated that the mark had already expired and could not be renewed. The court ruled that the Registrar’s failure to send this mandatory notification rendered the rejection invalid. Consequently, the court directed the authorities to issue a fresh statutory notice to the petitioner, granting him an opportunity to submit a formal renewal application and fees for lawful consideration and a proper hearing.6 Read more here.

Outsiders Not Allowed: Delhi High Court Shuts Down Third-Party Challenge to Cipla’s ‘NO DARAR’ Trademark

The Delhi High Court dismissed applications filed by a third party seeking to join Cipla Limited’s writ petition regarding the restoration of its “NO DARAR” trademark, labelling the applicant a “rank outsider” with no legal standing in the dispute. Justice Saurabh Banerjee held that the third party was neither a necessary nor a proper party, as the writ petition was strictly an administrative matter between Cipla and the Trade Marks Registry concerning the restoration and renewal of their mark in Class 5. The applicant was trying to cancel a May 2025 court order that let Cipla restore its trademark, which the Trademark Registry had already updated from “Removed” back to “Registered”. However, the High Court rejected their argument and explained that a closed case cannot be reopened to settle new disagreements, especially since the third party had not even tried standard legal options, such as filing a trademark rectification petition.7 Read more here.

Seniority in Application Overrides Interim Market Use: Delhi High Court Upholds Rival’s ‘20-20’ Registration Against Parle

Delhi High Court dismissed an appeal filed by Parle Products Pvt. Ltd. against a Single Judge’s decision that allowed the registration of the trademark “20-20” in favour of a rival manufacturer.8 The rival company had filed its “proposed to be used” application in 2007, making it the senior applicant over Parle, which filed for the same mark days later. Despite Parle launching its “20-20” biscuits commercially in 2007–2008 and obtaining registration while the rival’s application faced 17 years of administrative and procedural delays at the Trademark Registry, the bench held that under Section 18 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999, registration relates back to the filing date, and subsequent interim market use by a junior applicant cannot defeat a senior applicant’s statutory priority. The court ruled that registry delays could not prejudice the prior applicant. Furthermore, the court held that Parle was legally barred from alleging deceptive similarity because it had previously argued before the Registry, to overcome initial objections, that its mark was visually and conceptually distinct from the cited marks, making its conflicting stance an impermissible case of approbating and reprobating.9 Read more here.

Scale Doesn’t Beat Registration: Gujarat High Court Lift Injunction in ‘Aditya Jewellers’ Case

The Gujarat High Court set aside an interim injunction that had barred registered trademark owners from using the brand name “Aditya Jewellers”, and held that a higher sales volume does not give an unregistered business automatic priority over a prior, registered user. The dispute arose when an unregistered jeweller claiming continuous mark usage since 2007 sued a rival firm who held a valid registration from 2021 and evidence of mark usage dating back to 2002, over alleged passing off and infringement. While the trial court originally granted an injunction based on the plaintiff’s superior annual turnover, a Division Bench held that the lower court erred by conducting an improper “mini-trial” and unfairly discarding the defendants’ historical sales records at an interlocutory stage. The Court clarified that financial scale alone cannot establish prima facie dishonest adoption against a prior user, and directed the trial court to decide the dispute independently through a full trial.10 Read more here.

Madras High Court Rules ‘CYCLE’ Brand is Protected Across Different Products

The Madras High Court partly allowed an appeal by the maker of Cycle brand agarbathis (incense sticks), permanently restraining the Respondent from using the trademark “CYCLE” for its edible oils.11 Reversing a 2021 single-judge ruling, the Court held that the well-known “CYCLE” mark enjoys a widespread reputation extending beyond incense products and is entitled to protection across dissimilar goods under Section 29(4) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. The High Court noted that the Appellant held valid registrations across multiple classes (including Class 29 and 30 for food products), while the edible oil company failed to provide a valid reason or supporting documents for adopting the identical name in 2009. Concluding that the unauthorized use was without due cause and threatened to take unfair advantage of the brand’s distinctiveness, the court ordered the edible oil manufacturer to surrender all offending packaging materials within eight weeks, but rejected additional claims for passing off and financial damages due to lack of proof.12 Read more here.

Balancing Anti-Piracy and Neutrality: Delhi High Court Issues Dynamic Order to Block HBO Content Streamers

The Delhi High Court issued an ad-interim injunction restraining 30 “rogue websites” from illegally hosting, streaming, and broadcasting copyrighted motion pictures owned by Home Box Office Inc. (“HBO”).13 The Court recognized that the operators hid behind privacy-protection policies to mask their identities while flagrantly violating copyright laws for commercial gain. Addressing concerns about rogue sites evading injunctions through mirror or redirect URLs, the Court instituted a balanced enforcement mechanism: HBO can notify Domain Name Registrars (“DNRs”) and Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”) of new mirror domains on affidavit. DNRs and ISPs are tasked solely with technical verification where they have to verify the technical details to confirm it is a copycat site. They can then temporarily block the site while HBO formally asks the court to add it to the lawsuit. This approach is aimed to prevent internet providers/intermediaries from losing their statutory “safe harbour” protection while keeping pirated content from easily dodging the court’s blocking orders.14 Read more here.

Delhi High Court Examines DABUS Appeal in AI Patent Case

The Delhi High Court issued notice to the Indian Patent Office in an appeal filed by US scientist Stephen Thaler, raising the legal question of whether an artificial intelligence (“AI”) system can be named as an inventor under Indian patent law. Justice Jyoti Singh heard the appeal challenging an April 15 order from the Assistant Controller of Patents, which had rejected Thaler’s application for a fractal-profile food container autonomously generated by his AI system, DABUS (“Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience”). The Patent Office had refused the application after finding that it lacked an inventive step, that DABUS could not be recognized as a “true and first inventor”, and that Thaler had failed to fulfil inventorship declaration requirements. Contesting the rejection, Thaler has argued that Section 2(1)(y) of the Patents Act, 1970 does not explicitly restrict an inventor to being a natural person, clarifying that while DABUS must be listed as the inventor to accurately reflect the source of the idea, the patent rights would ultimately belong to him as the system’s creator. The High Court is scheduled to hear the matter next on September 18.15

International Update

UK Supreme Court Rules Tesla Can Challenge Avanci’s 5G Patent Pool Rates Under FRAND Commitments

The UK Supreme Court overturned previous lower-court rulings to reinstate Tesla’s lawsuit against InterDigital and the licensing platform Avanci, establishing that English courts possess the jurisdiction to evaluate whether global patent pool rates comply with Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (“FRAND”) terms. The dispute stemmed from Tesla’s challenge to Avanci’s non-negotiable royalty rate for a large number of standard-essential patents (“SEPs”) related to 5G vehicle connectivity, which includes 170,000 patents across 65 contributing owners, including InterDigital. Overruling the Court of Appeal’s majority, the Supreme Court held that patent holders cannot evade their FRAND commitments by licensing through a third-party platform. Because negotiating bilateral agreements with dozens of separate patent owners is commercially impracticable, the justices recognized Avanci as the essential party since it independently sets the platform’s pricing structure. The ruling also confirmed that service upon the foreign entities was properly executed under UK procedural rules because the claims directly related to UK-registered patents, while rejecting Delaware as a viable alternative forum on the grounds that foreign courts would not determine FRAND terms for international patent portfolios.16 Read more here.

Federal Judge Allows Reddit’s AI Copyright Suit Against Perplexity to Proceed

A Manhattan federal judge rejected most of Perplexity AI’s request to dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by Reddit, ruling that the social media platform can proceed with its claims regarding unauthorized data scraping for AI training. U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer affirmed that Reddit has legal standing to sue over the alleged misuse of its users’ content and the circumvention of technical security barriers by Perplexity and three named data-scraping intermediaries: Oxylabs, AWMProxy, and SerpApi. Reddit, which has already established paid content-licensing agreements with tech companies like Google and OpenAI, accused the scraping firms of taking data from billions of search results without authorization to feed Perplexity’s AI search engine. While Perplexity argued it was defending the open internet against overreaching access controls, Reddit maintained that the ruling marks a key step toward holding companies accountable for bypassing platform protections and commercializing community content without permission.17 Read more here.

German Court Rules AI Music Generator Suno Broke Copyright Laws

A Munich regional court ruled in favour of German collecting society GEMA in its copyright lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, issuing an order for injunctive relief, revenue disclosure, and financial damages. The dispute focused on six famous hit songs including “Forever Young”, “Daddy Cool”, and “Mambo No. 5” which Suno copied from YouTube via stream-ripping techniques to train its AI models. The court established international jurisdiction over training activities conducted on U.S. servers and rejected Suno’s “fair use” and data-mining defences. The judges held that because Suno’s AI models actually memorized the music and reproduced recognizable parts of the original compositions when prompted, the platform committed unlawful copyright infringement rather than permissible data analysis. The ruling held the AI platform accountable for memorizing and outputting copyrighted material.18 Read more here.

Fighting AI Generated content With Digital Labels: EU Rolls Out AI Transparency Mandates

Starting August 2, new rules under the European Union’s AI Act require artificial images, audio, video, and text designed to look authentic to be clearly labelled and digitally watermarked to protect democracy and fight deceptive deepfakes. Newly released AI tools must comply immediately, while existing tools have a four-month grace period to follow the rules, with violators facing fines of up to 15 million euros or 3% of their global annual turnover. Tech giants like Google and Meta have signed a voluntary agreement to support these measures, though industry groups worry that labelling everything, from political speeches to simple background scenery in ads will lead to “label fatigue”, causing people to ignore the disclaimers much like website cookie pop-ups.19 Read more here.

Global AI Patent Grants Exceed 100,000 for the First Time

In its annual IFI Insights: Inventing AI report, IFI CLAIMS Patent Services revealed that global artificial intelligence patent grants topped 107,279 in 2025, surpassing the 100,000 mark for the first time in history and reflecting an 83% surge over three years. Worldwide AI patent applications reached 209,518, heavily driven by rapid acceleration in “agentic AI” filings, which surged 59% over the past year to represent 15% of all AI patent activity. Nvidia emerged as the top applicant for agentic AI domestically and globally. Meanwhile, Samsung led total AI patent applications globally and, in the U.S., while Google dominated generative AI filings. The report highlighted starkly divergent intellectual property strategies among major AI developers for example, OpenAI filed 35 global applications in 2025, while competitors like DeepSeek and xAI held zero patent filings, relying instead on trade secrets or defensive strategies due to ongoing patent eligibility scrutiny under U.S. law.20 Read more here.

  1. M/S Raj Abhushan Bhandar v. The Assistant Registrar of Trade Marks & Anr., R/Letters Patent Appeal No. 619 of 2026 with R/Letters Patent Appeal No. 620 of 2026. ↩︎
  2. Riya Rathore, Bombay High Court Rejects EYETEX DIVYA Owner’s Plea Against DIVYAM Trademark, LiveLaw Biz, (July 29, 2026), https://www.livelawbiz.com/trademark/bombay-high-court-rejects-eyetex-divya-owners-plea-against-divyam-trademark-543450. ↩︎
  3. TV Today Network v. Saurashtra Aaj Tak and Anr., RFA 320/2012 & CM APPL. 80300/2025. ↩︎
  4. S N Thyagarajan, Delhi High Court restrains Gujarati newspaper from using ‘Saurashtra Aaj Tak’ after Aaj Tak objects, Bar and Bench (July 31, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/delhi-high-court-restrains-gujarati-newspaper-from-using-saurashtra-aaj-tak-after-aaj-tak-objects. ↩︎
  5. S. Prasannan v. Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks & Anr., WP(C) NO. 7528 OF 2018. ↩︎
  6. Riya Rathore, Trade Marks Registry Cannot Remove Trademark Without Mandatory Notice: Kerala High Court, LiveLaw Biz (July 28, 2026), https://www.livelawbiz.com/trademark/registrar-cannot-delete-mark-without-issuing-expiry-notice-kerala-high-court-quashes-removal-of-trademark-543256. ↩︎
  7. Cipla Limited v. Union of India & Ors., W.P.(C)-IPD 23/2025 dated July 27, 2026. ↩︎
  8. Parle Products Pvt Ltd v. The Registrar of Trade Marks & Anr., LPA 316/2026 & CM APPL. 27819-20/2026. ↩︎
  9. Riya Rathore, Delhi High Court Dismisses Parle’s Appeal Against Rival Biscuit Maker’s ‘20-20’ Trademark Registration, LiveLaw Biz (July 28, 2026), https://www.livelawbiz.com/trademark/delhi-high-court-dismisses-parle-appeal-in-20-20-trademark-dispute-rules-prior-applicant-cannot-be-ousted-by-subsequent-user-543242. ↩︎
  10. Tinubhai Babubhai Bhalgama & Ors. v. Alpeshbhai Ranchhodbhai Lunagariya & Ors., 2026: GUJHC: 47815-DB dated July 28, 2026. ↩︎
  11. N. Ranga Rao & Sons Private Ltd. v. Sree Annapoorna Agro Foods, O.SA. (CAD) No.3 of 2022. ↩︎
  12. Riya Rathore, Madras High Court Restrains Edible Oil Firm, Holds ‘CYCLE’ Mark Has Reputation Beyond Agarbattis, LiveLaw Biz (July 30, 2026), https://www.livelawbiz.com/trademark/madras-high-court-restrains-edible-oil-firm-holds-cycle-mark-has-reputation-beyond-agarbattis-543649. ↩︎
  13. Home Box Office Inc & Ors v. Streamzy.to & Ors, CS(COMM)740/2026. ↩︎
  14. S N Thyagarajan, Copyright owners, ISPs cannot decide if website is ‘rogue’: Delhi High Court, Bar and Bench (July 27, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/copyright-owners-isps-cannot-decide-if-website-is-rogue-delhi-high-court. ↩︎
  15. S N Thyagarajan, Can AI be considered inventor under patent law? Delhi HC seeks Patent Office response to US scientist’s plea, Bar and Bench (July 30, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/can-ai-be-considered-inventor-under-patent-law-delhi-hc-seeks-patent-office-response-to-us-scientists-plea. ↩︎
  16. Steve Brachmann, UK Supreme Court Revives Tesla’s Claims That Avanci 5G Vehicle Pool License Doesn’t Satisfy FRAND Obligations, IP Watchdog (July 29, 2026), https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/07/28/uk-supreme-court-revives-teslas-claims-that-avanci-5g-vehicle-pool-license-doesnt-satisfy-frand-obligations/. ↩︎
  17. Blake Brittain, Perplexity AI loses bid to toss Reddit lawsuit over data scraping, Reuters (July 31, 2026), https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/perplexity-ai-loses-bid-toss-reddit-lawsuit-over-data-scraping-2026-07-31/. ↩︎
  18. German court rules AI music firm Suno broke copyright rules, Reuters (July 31, 2026), https://www.reuters.com/world/german-court-rules-ai-music-firm-suno-broke-copyright-rules-2026-07-31/. ↩︎
  19. Jennifer Rankin, AI labels to be compulsory on authentic-looking content under EU rules, The Guardian (July 31, 2026), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/31/ai-labels-to-be-compulsory-on-authentic-looking-content-under-eu-rules. ↩︎
  20. Rose Esfandiari, Global AI Patent Grants Top 100,000 for First Time as Agentic AI Filings Accelerate, IP Watchdog (July 29, 2026), https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/07/29/global-ai-patent-grants-top-100000-for-first-time-as-agentic-ai-filings-accelerate/. ↩︎

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