This Week in IP

Image credits: via Magnific

Drafting credit: Avani Marudwar, Research Associate

Weekly IPR Update | 1o August 2026 – 16 August 2026

Court Says Defendants Can Cross-Examine Plaintiffs on How Long They Have Actually Used a Trademark

The Supreme Court of India allowed an appeal by Shabu K.N. Achary against a High Court order that had disallowed a question he wanted to put to the plaintiff during cross-examination in a trademark suit brought by Dharampal Premchand Limited. Dharampal Premchand Limited had sued Achary for a permanent injunction, a declaration of exclusive ownership, and damages, alleging that his packaging and trade dress copied its ‘BABA’ brand identity. During the trial, Achary sought to ask Dharampal Premchand a pointed question, namely whether it was correct that the company had no document to show since when the mark BABA had actually been in use. The High Court disallowed the question because Achary’s own written statement was not yet on record, but a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and K. Vinod Chandran reversed that view, holding that once a plaintiff alleges trademark infringement, the defendant is entitled to test the claimed duration of use through cross-examination regardless of whether its written statement has been filed. The Court was careful to note that its ruling addressed only the permissibility of the question and not the merits of the underlying trademark dispute. The appeal was allowed, and the trial now proceeds with Dharampal Premchand recalled to answer it.1 Read more here.

Delhi High Court Allows Dabur to Clear Existing ‘Cool King Thanda Tel’ Stock, But Only on Tight Conditions

A Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, comprising Justices Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora and V. Kameswar Rao, ruled that a single judge had lacked jurisdiction to modify an injunction the Division Bench itself had already affirmed, while still preserving limited relief for Dabur India Limited on equitable grounds. Emami Limited had sued Dabur alleging that its ‘Cool King Thanda Tel’ product infringed Emami’s registered trademarks through deceptively similar trade dress, and a single judge granted an interim injunction against Dabur on January 31, 2026, which the Division Bench upheld on May 22, 2026. Dabur then asked the single judge for permission to sell off roughly 9,020 cartons manufactured before the injunction took effect, and the single judge allowed this subject to conditions on June 19, 2026. Emami’s fresh appeal argued that the single judge had no power to entertain that application once the Division Bench had already ruled, since the original order had merged into the appellate judgment and could only be varied by the Division Bench itself. The Court agreed on the jurisdiction point, nonetheless it chose to treat the stock disposal permission as though the Division Bench had granted it directly. The Delhi High Court reasoned that letting Dabur exhaust genuinely pre-injunction stock avoided needless economic waste. It tightened the conditions considerably. Sales are now limited to stock manufactured before January 31, 2026, must stop entirely by September 30, 2026, require weekly inventory disclosures, and any unsold units must be recalled, destroyed, or donated by that date. Dabur was also ordered to pull every listing from e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and BigBasket immediately, leaving physical retail as the only permitted channel until the deadline. 2 Read more here.

Why Doesn’t Everybody Have Access to It? Delhi High Court Presses Meta to Explain Who Gets Its Copyright Protection Tool

The Delhi High Court directed Meta Platforms, Inc. to disclose the eligibility criteria and internal policy governing access to its Rights Manager copyright protection tool, after content creator Mohit Kumar told the court he had been rejected three times without explanation. 3 Kumar, who runs an educational channel called “Rise With Mohit” focused on artificial intelligence, business, and e-commerce coaching, alleged that unidentified individuals had downloaded his original videos, falsely claimed ownership of them through Meta’s own Rights Manager tool, and then used that false claim to trigger copyright strikes against his accounts. His counsel argued that Meta’s approval criteria looked inconsistent, since some creators with smaller followings had been granted access to the tool while established creators with significant engagement and commercial partnerships, including Kumar, had not. Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani pressed Meta on the point directly, asking why everybody did not simply have access to it if the tool exists to protect creators from exactly this kind of misuse. Meta told the Court that the disputed strikes against Kumar had already been reversed, his content restored, and his accounts kept accessible, and it agreed to reconsider his Rights Manager application and place its governing policy before the Court. Justice A.J. Bhambhani made the interim protection against takedowns conditional on Kumar producing evidence that the copyright strikes against him were fraudulent. Thus, the relief is not unconditional and could unwind if that evidence does not hold up. The Court drew on the Supreme Court’s decision in Yamini Manohar v. T.K.D. Keerthi and the Division Bench ruling in Chandra Kishore Chaurasia v. R A Perfumery Works (P) Ltd. in framing the scope of interim relief available at this stage. 4 Read more here.

Delhi High Court Issues Notice on Broader Challenge to Meta’s Copyright Strike System

The Delhi High Court issued notice on a petition by content creator Saurabh Maurya challenging the legitimacy of Meta’s copyright strike mechanism, even after Meta had already restored his account and reversed the strikes against it. Maurya’s account had gone offline from July 27, 2026 after someone allegedly backdated a Blogspot post to falsely claim prior ownership of his content, which triggered the strikes in the first place. Rather than treat the reinstatement as the end of the matter, Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani agreed to examine Maurya’s wider argument that Meta’s enforcement process lets anyone remove content simply by claiming, without any court order, that they posted it first. Maurya relied on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India to argue that intermediaries should act only on judicial orders rather than unverified ownership claims, pointing also to Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act and the Delhi High Court’s earlier decision in MySpace Inc. v. Super Cassettes Industries. The notice keeps the broader question of how far an intermediary can go on a bare, unverified claim of prior ownership alive for further hearing, independent of whether any individual creator’s account has since been restored.5 Read more here.

Justice Bhambhani on a Roll! Delhi High Court Questions the Limits of the Bachchan Family’s Reputation

More than three years after Aaradhya Bachchan first went to court over a wave of fake videos claiming she was gravely ill or had died, the Delhi High Court is now wrestling with the deeper legal questions her suit raises. 6 The case began in 2023, when several YouTube channels circulated monetized, allegedly morphed videos about the health of Aaradhya, then eleven years old, prompting her father Abhishek Bachchan to sue on her behalf against the channel ‘Bollywood Time’ and others, with Google LLC joined as an intermediary. Justice C. Hari Shankar’s original interim order restrained the defendants from further dissemination, directed Google to identify the channel operators, and ordered the offending videos delisted. At an August 13, 2026 hearing before Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani, the Court framed two questions for closer examination, namely how far the reputation of a famous family name actually extends across generations, and whether spreading fake news about a person can itself amount to a violation of personality or intellectual property rights. Those questions touch several doctrines the suit has raised since 2023, including the constitutional right to privacy under Article 21, defamation, passing off, and the intermediary obligations set out in Rule 3(1)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. No final ruling has emerged yet, and the matter continues. 7 Read more here.

Delhi High Court Refuses to Stop a Rival Channel From Rebroadcasting Gurbani From the Golden Temple

The Delhi High Court declined to grant interim relief to the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee [SGPC] in its copyright suit against Galactic Television and Communications over the rebroadcast of Gurbani, the sacred hymns and scripture recited at the Golden Temple. SGPC, which manages the Golden Temple and currently distributes the daily telecast itself through YouTube and the channel PTC, accused Galactic Television of infringement for rebroadcasting the same content with only a ten second delay, and argued that this could not qualify as fair dealing. Galactic Television countered that no copyright subsists in the Gurbani broadcast at all, and that its non-commercial rebroadcasting would in any event fall within statutory exemptions. Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani sided with the defendant at this interim stage, reasoning that the Guru Granth Sahib is properly understood as a literary cum musical work, and that a religious broadcast carried out without commercial exploitation may not amount to infringement. He pointed to possible exemptions under Sections 52(1)(z)(a) and 52(1)(l) of the Copyright Act, 1957 as the basis for declining to intervene at this stage. The matter will return to court on September 24, 2026. 8 Read more here.

Human in the Loop: CGPDTM Issues Guidelines on How Much AI Patent Examiners Can Actually Use

The Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks released formal Guidelines for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Patent Examination Procedures, setting out when examiners and controllers may lean on AI tools and where the line falls. 9 The Guidelines apply across examination tasks such as classification, search, translation support, drafting assistance, technical comparison, and knowledge retrieval, and they draw a firm distinction between public AI tools, which are broadly accessible consumer platforms, and private AI tools operated in closed, security controlled environments. They catalogue fourteen specific failure modes to watch for, including hallucinated citations, omitted claim limitations, false pattern matching, and outdated training data, and they repeatedly stress that AI is meant to assist rather than replace an examiner’s own judgment, with every AI assisted output subject to independent verification. A dedicated table walks through twelve typical use cases, from suggesting patent classifications to summarising case law, pairing each with its risks and required safeguards. Six uses are prohibited outright, most notably entering unpublished application material into public AI tools, relying on AI generated citations without independently verifying them against authentic sources, and issuing office actions or hearing notices based solely on AI output without adequate human oversight. To enforce all this, the CGPDTM may require logging of material AI use and has provided for a dedicated AI Governance Committee, drawn from examiners, controllers, and IT and quality staff, to approve tools, review complaints, and periodically revise the Guidelines as the technology develops. You can access the guidelines here.

CESTAT Says Printing Intel’s Mark Without Designing the Ad Isn’t ‘Advertising’ At All

The Customs, Excise and Service Tax Appellate Tribunal set aside a service tax demand of roughly Rs 22.85 crore against HCL Infosystems Ltd., spanning five separate heads that ranged from employee cost reimbursements between group companies to printer rental arrangements to the sale of training course material. One strand of that demand touched HCL’s dealings with Intel Corporation. The department had taxed roughly Rs 35.34 lakh that Intel reimbursed to HCL under the “Intel Inside” co-branding programme, treating the payment as consideration for “advertising agency services” under Section 66F of the Finance Act. HCL’s defence turned on who actually owned the mark. Intel designed and owned the “Intel Inside” logo, and HCL’s only role was to print and display it on the computers it manufactured, with no hand in conceptualising, visualising, or designing the underlying advertisement. Leaning on a 1999 CBIC circular and a run of precedents including Zodiac Advertisers v. CCE, Cochin and Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. CCE, HCL argued that merely displaying a mark someone else created and owns falls well short of what “advertising agency service” requires, since that category has consistently been read to demand creative involvement in the advertisement rather than mechanical reproduction of it. As a fallback, HCL also argued that since Intel is based abroad and paid in convertible foreign exchange, the arrangement would in any event qualify as an export of service and escape the levy on that separate ground. The Tribunal agreed with HCL’s primary argument and did not need to reach the export point. It held that because Intel owned and supplied the logo while HCL contributed no creative or conceptual work of its own, the activity did not meet the statutory definition of advertising agency services, and set aside the tax demand on this count entirely. 10 Read more here.

International Update

Second Circuit Rules that Xinuos Waited Too Long to Sue IBM Over UNIX Code

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed summary judgment for IBM and Red Hat, Inc., holding that Xinuos, Inc.’s copyright infringement claim over decades-old UNIX source code was filed far too late. The dispute traces back to a 1998 joint development agreement between IBM and the Santa Cruz Operation, called Project Monterey, aimed at building UNIX-based operating systems and carrying its own two-year limitations period for breach claims. IBM terminated the project in 2001. Santa Cruz’s business later passed to Caldera Systems, which became SCO Group and sued IBM in Utah in 2003 over the alleged misappropriation of Project Monterey source code. SCO Group filed for bankruptcy in 2007, and in January 2011 sold its software assets to Xinuos through an asset purchase agreement that expressly excluded any rights or claims relating to IBM. That Utah litigation had its own long run: the district court granted IBM summary judgment on the remaining claims in 2016, only for the Tenth Circuit to revive the misappropriation claim and send it back for trial, finding it timely under the joint development agreement’s two-year window. IBM and SCO Group eventually settled in August 2021, with SCO releasing IBM from all claims tied to Project Monterey, a settlement Xinuos objected to, but the bankruptcy court approved anyway. Xinuos filed its own copyright suit against IBM and Red Hat that same year, alleging that IBM had copied the proprietary code it obtained through Project Monterey into IBM’s AIX operating system. 11 Judges Guido Calabresi, Steven J. Menashi, and Sarah A. L. Merriam looked past the copyright label Xinuos had put on its claim. The panel drew a line between two kinds of licensing disputes: claims that a party exceeded the scope of an existing license, which count as fresh infringement each time they recur, and claims that a valid license never came into existence in the first place, which accrue only once. The court found that Xinuos’s real complaint, was that IBM had never satisfied the conditions needed to obtain a continuing license under the joint development agreement, placing it squarely in the second category. Even though IBM kept using the code well past 2001, the panel treated IBM’s original taking of it that year as the one-time event that started the clock, rather than treating each later use as a fresh act of infringement. On that reading, the claim accrued once a reasonably diligent plaintiff would have been put on notice of a problem with IBM’s right to use the code, and the court found Xinuos had exactly that notice by January 2011, when its own asset purchase agreement expressly flagged SCO Group’s unresolved misappropriation claim against IBM. Applying the Copyright Act’s ordinary three-year limitations period from that point still left Xinuos’s 2021 lawsuit years too late. The panel rejected Xinuos’s remaining arguments as without merit and affirmed the district court in full. Because the ruling came down as a summary order rather than a published opinion, with no dissent or concurrence, it carries no precedential weight of its own. Read more here.

Federal Circuit Won’t Revisit the Rules for Design Patents, Even As Chief Judge Moore Warns the Test Has Gone Off the Rails

A fractured Federal Circuit denied En Banc a rehearing in a fight over the proper test for design patent infringement, leaving intact a February 2026 panel ruling against Range of Motion Products LLC. 12 Range of Motion, known as RoM, holds a design patent covering its Rolflex massage device and sued Armaid Company, Inc., claiming its Armaid2 product copied that design. A district court in Maine had granted summary judgment for Armaid after finding that many of the design’s features were functional rather than ornamental, and the February panel affirmed, holding that claim construction must strip out functional elements before any substantial similarity comparison takes place. On the petition for rehearing, Judges Cunningham and Hughes defended that approach as consistent with both Supreme Court and Federal Circuit precedent, with Judge Cunningham writing that revisiting the governing Egyptian Goddess, Inc. v. Swisa, Inc. test would not have changed the outcome here anyway. Chief Judge Moore, joined by Judge Reyna, dissented sharply. She argued that the panel had effectively eliminated the jury’s role in what should remain a factual question, and that it had quietly shifted the inquiry away from Gorham Mfg. Co. v. White’s classic ordinary observer standard toward asking whether two designs are merely sufficiently distinct or plainly dissimilar. Judge Pauline Newman did not participate, consistent with her 2023 recusal. With rehearing denied, the panel’s narrower approach to design patent infringement remains the law for now, though the sharpness of the dissent suggests this fight is unlikely to be over. 13 Read more here.

Novartis Keeps Its Heart Failure Blockbuster Protected: UK Court Rejects Every Challenge to the Entresto Patent

The UK High Court’s Patents Court rejected every attack Accord Healthcare Limited brought against Novartis AG’s patent covering the valsartan and sacubitril combination in Entresto, a widely used heart failure treatment, and went on to find that Novartis’s supplementary protection certificate over the same combination is valid too. 14 The underlying patent expired in 2023, but Novartis’s SPC keeps protection running until 2028, and Accord had brought the case to clear the way for a rival generic once Novartis’s data exclusivity ends on November 23, 2026. Accord argued the combination was obvious over two earlier research papers, that the patent’s disclosed results were too vague to be plausible, and that the invention amounted to nothing more than a predictable pairing of two drugs that were each already known on their own. Mr Justice Meade rejected each argument in turn, finding the patent’s disclosure sufficient and concluding that combining sacubitril, a drug that had disappointed as a standalone treatment, with valsartan required more inventive insight than Accord’s evidence could show. On the supplementary protection certificate, the Court held that the relevant ‘product’ for the purposes of Article 3 of the SPC Regulation is the broader combination of valsartan and sacubitril, rather than the narrower co-crystal form Accord had focused on, applying the two part test the CJEU set out in Royalty Pharma. Because Accord’s proposed generic would use exactly that combination, even in a different physical form, the Court concluded it would infringe the SPC. Novartis’s win keeps Entresto protected against generic competition until the SPC itself expires in 2028, with the form of the final order still to be settled between the parties. Read more here.

CJEU Asked Whether Hiding a Website From a Country Is Enough to Dodge a Trademark

An Austrian court has referred a fresh question to the Court of Justice of the European Union in a trademark dispute between two rival cooperage businesses, both trading under variations of the name ‘Pauscha.’ 15 Fassbinderei Klaus Pauscha GmbH holds Austrian trademarks for ‘PAUSCHA’ and ‘KLAUS PAUSCHA’ covering wooden barrels, while the defendant, PA. Fassbinderei GmbH, sells identical goods under the same word through a website at pauscha.at aimed exclusively at buyers outside Austria. To comply with an earlier preliminary injunction, the defendant geo-blocked Austrian internet addresses from reaching its site and added a disclaimer stating that the website is not intended for the Austrian market, even though it continues to operate the business from within Austria and its domain still turns up in search results next to the claimant’s. The referring court wants to know whether trademark territoriality and Articles 10(2) and 10(3) of the EU Trade Mark Directive block an injunction over a country code domain that carries a protected mark once the site is geo-blocked and disclaimed, or whether the defendant’s Austrian business presence and the risk of confusing search results keep the claim alive regardless. The reference draws on the CJEU’s existing case law on what counts as ‘use’ of a mark in Daimler and on the targeting requirement for online infringement set out in L’Oreal v eBay, alongside the more recent Anne Frank decision on geo-blocking in a copyright context. Once it comes, the CJEU’s answer will matter well beyond wine barrels, since geo-blocking paired with a disclaimer is a common compliance strategy for any business trying to satisfy a national injunction without shutting its website down entirely. 16 Read more here.

Copyright Office Finalizes Easier Registration Rules for Fast-Moving News Websites

The U.S. Copyright Office issued a final rule amending its Group Registration of Updates to a News Website program, making it easier for frequently updated news sites to register their content as a collective work rather than filing separately for every update. 17 Effective immediately, the rule refines the definition of an eligible ‘news website’ as one primarily designed to be a source of written information on current events, whether local, national, or international, and it requires that the site cover diverse subject matter, focus mainly on reporting current events, and update its content regularly. The program, first introduced in July 2024, lets qualifying sites register using representative samples of their content instead of submitting complete website copies for every update, and the Office said the amendment is meant to simplify administration of the program for news publishers and other rights holders who rely on it. Read more here.

Basmati Belongs to Both: Australian Federal Court Rejects India’s Bid to Trademark the Name Alone

The Federal Court of Australia dismissed an appeal by India’s Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority seeking to register ‘Basmati’ as a certification trademark for rice, and ordered the authority to pay the costs of the appeal. 18 A trademark delegate had already rejected the application back in December 2022, finding that the word ‘Basmati’ could not distinguish rice certified by the Indian authority from Basmati rice legitimately grown and sold by other traders. On appeal, the Federal Court upheld that reasoning, recognising that Basmati rice originates from a geographic region spanning both India and Pakistan rather than belonging to one country alone. Pakistan’s Ministry of Commerce, which announced the outcome, described the ruling as confirming that Pakistani producers hold equally legitimate rights to market their rice under the Basmati name in international trade, framing the decision as preventing any single country from monopolising the term.19 Read more here.

  1. LiveLaw News Network, Trademark Suit | Defendant Can Cross-Examine Plaintiff On Period Of Brand Use Though Written Statement Not On Record: Supreme Court, LiveLaw (Aug. 12, 2026) ↩︎
  2. Emami Ltd. v. Dabur India Ltd., FAO(OS)(COMM) 177/2026 (Del. H.C. Aug. 10, 2026). ↩︎
  3. Mohit Kumar v. John Doe/Ashok Kumar & Ors., CS(COMM) 858/2026 (Del. H.C. Aug. 12, 2026). ↩︎
  4. Bhavini Mishra, Delhi HC Seeks Meta Policy on Creator Access to Digital Copyright Tool, Business Standard (Aug. 12, 2026), https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/delhi-hc-seeks-meta-policy-on-creator-access-to-digital-copyright-tool-126081201764_1.html. ↩︎
  5. Riya Rathore, Delhi High Court Issues Notice on YouTuber’s Plea Challenging Meta’s Copyright Strike Mechanism, LiveLaw Biz (Aug. 11, 2026), https://www.livelawbiz.com/copyright/delhi-high-court-issues-notice-on-youtubers-plea-challenging-metas-copyright-strike-mechanism-545254 . ↩︎
  6. Ms. Aaradhya Bachchan & Anr. v. Bollywood Time & Ors., CS(COMM) 230/2023 (Del. H.C.) (hearing held Aug. 13, 2026). ↩︎
  7. Bhavini Srivastava, How Far Does Reputation of a Famous Family Name Extend? Delhi HC Asks in Aaradhya Bachchan Case, Bar and Bench (Aug. 13, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/how-far-does-reputation-of-a-famous-family-name-extend-delhi-hc-asks-in-aaradhya-bachchan-case ↩︎
  8. Prashant Jha, Delhi High Court Refuses to Stop Private Channel From Broadcasting Gurbani From Golden Temple, Bar and Bench (Aug. 14, 2026), https://www.barandbench.com/news/delhi-high-court-refuses-to-stop-private-channel-from-broadcasting-gurbani-from-golden-temple ↩︎
  9. Office of the Controller Gen. of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks, Guidelines for the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Patent Examination Procedures (2026). https://ipindia.gov.in/dynamic/news-details/119 ↩︎
  10. HCL Infosystems Ltd. v. Principal Commr., CGST, Noida, Service Tax Appeal No. 70695 of 2017, 2026 SCC ↩︎
  11. Xinuos, Inc. v. Int’l Bus. Machs. Corp., No. 25-1073 (2d Cir. Aug. 10, 2026). ↩︎
  12. Range of Motion Prods. LLC v. Armaid Co., (Fed. Cir. Aug. 11, 2026) (denying rehearing en banc). ↩︎
  13. Eileen McDermott, Fractured CAFC Denies En Banc Rehearing in Case on Proper Test for Design Patent Infringement, IPWatchdog (Aug. 11, 2026), https://ipwatchdog.com/2026/08/11/fractured-cafc-denies-en-banc-rehearing-in-case-on-proper-test-for-design-patent-infringement ↩︎
  14. Accord Healthcare Ltd. v. Novartis AG, [2026] EWHC 2127 (Pat), Case No. HP-2025-000010 (Eng. & Wales High Ct., Patents Ct., Aug. 13, 2026). ↩︎
  15. Fassbinderei Klaus Pauscha GmbH v. PA. Fassbinderei GmbH, Case C-584/26 (CJEU, reference pending 2026). ↩︎
  16. Marcel Pemsel, Geo-Blocked But Still Infringing? CJEU Asked to Rule on Trade Mark Territoriality and Geo-Blocking, The IPKat (Aug. 13, 2026), https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2026/08/geo-blocked-but-still-infringing-cjeu.html ↩︎
  17. U.S. Copyright Office, Group Registration of Updates to a News Website: Final Rule, NewsNet Issue 1091 (Aug. 13, 2026), https://copyright.gov/newsnet/2026/1091.html ↩︎
  18. Australia Rejects India’s Basmati Trademark Bid, Dawn (Aug. 13, 2026), https://www.dawn.com/news/2022492. ↩︎
  19. Ministry of Commerce, Government of Pakistan, Press Release No. 134, Australian Federal Court Dismisses Indian Appeal in Basmati Word Mark Case (Aug. 12, 2026), https://pid.gov.pk/site/press_detail/33556 ↩︎

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