Part II: Flower Nahi, Fire: Delhi HC Waters the Wrong Rights (Again!) 

/ By / Others, Privacy, Trademark

Building on Part I’s critique of the DHC’s doctrinal conflation in the Allu Arjun case, Part II of the post turns to a related concern: the Court’s failure to distinguish between vastly different forms of unauthorised use. In this post, Dr. Aakanksha Kumar explains how collapsing fan practices, commercial merchandise, and AI-driven misuse into a single category produces an overbroad and structurally flawed approach to personality rights. Dr. Aakanksha Kumar (She/Her) is an independent researcher and academic who also consults […]

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Part I: Flower Nahi, Fire: Delhi HC Waters the Wrong Rights (Again!) 

/ By / Copyright, Others, Overlaps in IP, Trademark

Recent personality rights orders from the Delhi High Court continue to push the doctrine into uncertain territory, with the latest ruling in favour of Allu Arjun marking a particularly sharp turn. In Part I of the two-part post on the order, Dr. Aakanksha Kumar argues that by characterizing the likeness of the actor as “copyrights of the plaintiff”, the Court collapses distinct IP doctrines into an overbroad conception of “personality rights,” raising serious concerns for copyright and publicity jurisprudence in

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SpicyIP Bells & Whistles: IP Events and Opportunities (21.04.2026)

/ By / Courses & Workshops, Opportunities

Welcome back to another week of Bells & Whistles. Before we get into this week’s Bell — we’ve just started a SpicyIP WhatsApp group to share updates and opportunities. Would be great to have you there (click the link to join the channel)! And as always, we’ve rounded up a mix of developments, opportunities, and thoughtful reads from across the IP world along with a Bell of the Week that’s well worth revisiting. Bell of the Week: Shodhganga Some bells do not

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The Inventor is still Human: Indian Patent Office’s DABUS Refusal

/ By / Innovation, Patent

In keeping with a broad global trend, the Indian Patent Office has refused Dr. Stephen Thaler’s patent application which sought to recognise Dr. Thaler’s AI system DABUS as the inventor of a ‘food container and devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention’. The Indian patent office’s decision goes a step beyond the refusals issued by other jurisdictions and discusses, along with inventorship, the question of patentability of the claimed invention. The refusal of the Indian Patent Office is a part

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AIR-1, Right of Publicity-0: Delhi HC’s CLATastrophic Mix-Up

/ By / Others, Trademark

This post is co-authored with Dr. Aakanksha Kumar. Dr. Aakanksha Kumar (She/Her) is an independent researcher and academic who also consults with content creators and advises Chhattisgarhi music artists on copyright-related matters. Previously, she served as Associate Professor, Associate Dean, and Associate Director of the Centre for Post Graduate Legal Studies (CPGLS) at Jindal Global Law School (JGLS). Since 2019, she has designed and taught a self-created elective course across law schools titled Comparative Celebrity Laws: Personality, Publicity and Free

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SpicyIP Weekly Review (April 13 – April 19)

/ By / Copyright, Others, Patent, Trademark

Entering the second half of April with a post on the ANI v OpenAI, judgment of which has been reserved by the Delhi HC. Can an entity that is no longer a registered copyright society continue to demand licensing fees? Post on PPL’s ongoing litigation. Another post on the Delhi HC holding that removing an original mark and replacing it with one’s own does not automatically amount to trademark infringement. Case summaries and IP developments from the country and the

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Repair, Remove, Replace: DHC saves the Repair Industry

/ By / Trademark

The question of whether a refurbisher, after repairing a product, can remove the affixed mark and replace it with his own has generated a lot of discussion on this blog. Last year, in a post, I had showed how the Delhi HC went from initially injuncting further sale of repaired goods u/s. 30(4) to allowing such sale as long as it was accompanied with disclosure on warranty. This, I argued, showed the Court’s softening stance towards refurbishers i.e. sale of repaired goods was

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ANI v OpenAI: Not Everything an LLM Does is Copyright Infringement

/ By / Copyright

With judgment now reserved in ANI v OpenAI, India stands at the cusp of what might be its first major judicial reckoning with the copyright implications of generative AI. The case raises foundational questions on whether AI systems merely process information in new ways or unlawfully appropriate protected expression. Vishno Sudheendra examines two of the most contested issues from the final hearings: chatbot web search functionality and memorization. Vishno is a fourth-year B.A., LL.B (Hons) student at the National Law

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DHC Stunts the Growth of Dynamic Injunctions, Demands the Legislature to Step In

/ By / Trademark

On 16 March 2026, a single bench (SB) of the Delhi High Court (DHC), in Mahindra and Mahindra Limited v. Diksha Sharma, provided a decisive inflection point in the evolution of dynamic injunction jurisprudence in India. The case started from a fairly typical trademark dispute involving the misuse of the “MAHINDRA” mark by packers and movers operating deceptively similar domain names as MAHINDRA AND MAHINDRA. Yet, the Court’s categorical refusal to sustain the dynamic injunction framework that extends the remedies

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From Delhi to Bombay, Music Licensing Goes Off the Beat

/ By / Copyright

A lot has been happening with the repertoire of sound recordings that Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) claims to own and manage. It is being used in saree showrooms, a group of 94 restaurants, high profile pubs and bars, restaurants and more. Against all these places, PPL has asserted an infringement of copyright for playing music without obtaining licenses. This has created a bizarre mix of situations. Whether PPL can exercise any legal capacity to collect licensing fees, after having surrendered

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