The case of Indiana Gratings v. Anand Udyog which was previously reported on the blog was based solely on an article. This post briefly will deal with the nuances of the judgment to elaborate upon the analysis in the preceding post.
– The present drawings were not registrible under the Designs Act. Apart from the West v. Francis, importantly the following highlights of this section of the judgment must be pointed out:
(a) A design that is multiplied/ intended to be multiplied by an industrial process will not be registrible under the Designs Act.
(b) It was reiterated using the precedents of AMP v. Utilux and Interlego v. Tyco that the basis of granting protection under the Designs Act was visual eye appeal.
(c) Therefore, where every feature of a sketch was governed by the functionality of the finished article the same would not fall within the purview of the Designs Act.
– Indiana Gratings held copyright in the drawings: Despite using the idea of the machines in question from a European design, the judges used precedents to explicitly state that this would fall within the accepted idea-expression dichotomy and the expression in the drawings of the Plaintiff would fulfil the requirement of ‘originality’. Therefore the same was copyrightable.
– The reliance on the judgment of LB Plastics has already been mentioned in the previous post dealing with this case. The judgment has been quoted extensively, the essence of which has been reproduced in the previous post.
– With respect to the contention that the 2-d drawings only held copyright and this did not extend to the 3-d finished articles, the judgment is very scattered and hardly any importance is laid on this specific contention. However this is mentioned mostly in conjunction with the specifics of what a copyright entails as specified under Section 14 (c) of the Act and other judgments such as the Popeye case.
In conclusion, the judgment says nothing that hasn’t already been said before. It very clearly relies on precedents to grant the temporary injunction as prayed in the case. As many of our readers have pointed out, there is no mention of the Mattel, Microfibre matters. However, I believe Sai giving us a detailed appraisal of the judgment and I shall leave that portion of the analysis to him.
A Big Thank You
SpicyIP has also found that once I reported that the judgment was unavailable online, several of our extremely helpful readers came forward to aid us. Thanks to our ever resourceful reader (Manu) who took the trouble to scan the judgment and an anonymous commentor who left us with the details for us to find the judgment on the Bombay HC website. I also was redirected to the website IndianIPR, which is an excellent resource for finding IP judgments- such as this one– as I have come to realise. With judgments being made available by this website and reported by SpicyIP, it seems like we have the latest in Indian IP news covered 😛 !
