Bulletin 40 | August 2026
Snapshots
DELHI HIGH COURT
The Court set aside the Registrar of Trade Marks’ order rejecting Columbia Pictures’ opposition to the mark ‘GHOST BUSTER’ in Class 5. The Court found that the Registrar had confined its analysis to the dissimilarity between the goods and class distinction, without addressing Columbia Pictures’ contention that ‘GHOSTBUSTERS’ was an earlier well-known mark entitled to protection under Section 11(2) of the Trade Marks Act. The Court clarified that a prior judicial or Rule 124 declaration of well-known status is not a pre-condition for invoking Section 11(2). The Registrar must independently assess whether the earlier mark qualifies for protection based on the evidence and statutory factors under Sections 2(1)(zg), 11(6) and 11(7), & examine the allegation of bad faith. Court remanded the matter for fresh adjudication.
BOMBAY HIGH COURT
The Court granted ad-interim relief to actress Preity Zinta in a suit filed for seeking protection of her “personality rights” and “publicity rights” against misuse of her personality through creation of AI-generated deepfakes, morphed images, chatbot personas, and/or other digital content using her personality traits created and disseminated without her consent.
The Court restrained persons/entities from violating her personality/publicity rights by utilizing her name, photographs, persona, in any form, for personal gains. The Court further directed YouTube, X (Twitter) and Facebook to take down/ block access to the infringing content, while restraining the chatbot service providers to add the actress’s names to their character creation and search blocklists to prevent creation of new characters using her name.
NATIONAL CONSUMER DISPUTES REDRESSAL COMMISSION, NEW DELHI
In a Revision Petition arising from the dismissal of an Appeal in a consumer dispute over repair of commercial taxi vehicles, the NCDRC condoned a delay of 1453 days in filing petition by invoking Section 14 of the Limitation Act. It was held that the Petitioner had bona fide pursued remedies before the SCDRC, NCDRC, and the High Court, keeping the dispute sub judice before different forums, entitling exclusion of that period.
The application for condonation of delay was allowed while interpreting Section 14 in light of the Delhi High Court’s judgement, in Roopinder Singh v. Emaar MGF Ltd. & Ors. This is a significant order as it marks the first instance of extending the benefit of exclusion of time under Section 14 to consumer proceeding.
SUPREME COURT
The Supreme Court considered an appeal by the producer of the animated film “Mahaprabhu Jagannath” against the Odisha High Court’s interim order restraining its release during the Rath Yatra. The High Court had noted objections to the film’s depiction of Lord Jagannath as being inconsistent with established religious traditions, devotional literature and temple practices, and emphasised balancing freedom of expression under Article 19(1)(a) with restrictions under Article 19(2), particularly where religious sentiments may be affected.
The Apex Court noted that the Central Board of Film Certificate had cleared the film and, considering the ongoing Rath Yatra and associated rituals, permitted exhibition only from 28.07.2026 i.e. after conclusion of the Rath Yatra.
SUPREME COURT OF INDIA
The Supreme Court addressed whether the mandatory 120-day time frame under the proviso to Order VIII Rule 1 of the CPC applies to a Plaintiff filing a written statement to a Defendant’s counter-claim in a commercial suit.
Answering in the affirmative, the Court held that a Plaintiff in a commercial suit governed by the Commercial Courts Act is bound by the mandate of the proviso to Order VIII Rule 1 CPC. The Plaintiff must file a written statement to a counter-claim ordinarily within 30 days, extendable up to a maximum of 120 days upon showing sufficient cause. The Court clarified that a counter-claim filed by a defendant is on par with a plaint, and the reply filed by the plaintiff thereto is essentially a written statement. Extending this strict timeline for the Plaintiff’s reply was held rational, as it achieves the same purpose of timely completion of pleadings.
Consequently, the appeals were dismissed.
Significant Judgments
DELHI HIGH COURT
The Court granted pro tem security to Interdigital across two suits (Cellular SEPs, HEVC SEP), holding that a prima facie case of essentiality and validity stood established. On conduct, the Court observed that given Transsion’s technical objections in negotiations, and progressively increasing counteroffers, it was not necessarily unwilling, as delay was not solely attributable to it.
Consequently, the Court deemed it appropriate to fix the quantum of pro tem as 1/5th of Transsion’s latest counter offer rather than the Plaintiffs’ offer, considering the gap between the two offers and the absence of Third Party License Agreements.
The essentiality/validity finding rested on several factors including, inter alia, the Plaintiff having executed licenses for the asserted portfolio; foreign counterparts of the cellular patents upheld as essential and valid in other jurisdictions; dismissal of Transsion’s revocation petitions abroad; foreign courts’ essentiality/validity findings on two counterpart patents in parallel litigation.
CENTRAL CONSUMER PROTECTION AUTHORITY (“CCPA”), NEW DELHI
The CCPA held SpiceJet Ltd. liable for employing deceptive interface designs on its website, including pre-ticked options, trick questions involving confusing/vague language, interface interference by highlighting certain information while obscuring other relevant information, and forced actions requiring users to subscribe to an unrelated service. The CCPA found that these design features were intended to secure consumer enrolment and subscriptions.
The CCPA observed that such practices fall within the ambit of “dark patterns”, i.e., deceptive user-interface designs intended to impair consumer autonomy and choice by misleading or manipulating users. Accordingly, SpiceJet was found to have violated the CCPA Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, and the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020.
Taking note of the corrective measures and modifications subsequently undertaken by SpiceJet vis-à-vis its website, the CCPA directed SpiceJet to remain compliant with the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 and the CCPA Guidelines for Prevention and Regulation of Dark Patterns, 2023, and to ensure continued maintenance of the corrective measures. The CCPA also imposed a penalty of INR 1 lakh on SpiceJet.
DELHI HIGH COURT
In a first of its kind ruling, the Court dismissed an application filed by the news outlet ANI Media against Open AI, seeking interim injunction against storing its news articles and republishing the content thereof through its Artificial Intelligence (AI) user interface, ChatGPT. Analysing judicial precedents, the Court was of the view that :
- The commercial purpose of use did not prima facie disentitle organizations from “private use” under Section 52(1)(a)(i) of the Copyright Act,1957. Scraping and temporarily storing of literary work (news articles) publicly available over the internet for the training of Large Language Models (“LLMs”) falls within the scope of Fair Dealing under Section 52(1)(a)(i) as “private use” and “research” since the copyrighted articles are only processed internally. It was further observed that the acts of further research cannot be confined to acts of human beings alone and the same would extend to machine learning as well.
- Establishing infringement in the context of news articles would require demonstrating substantial similarity between the ChatGPT responses and the underlying news articles. Without material reproduction and/or “regurgitation” of the language and expressive elements of the copyrighted works, the bench held that the outputs did not amount to copyright infringement.
- Outputs regurgitating information published after the cut- off date for the training data set of the LLM models did not amount to storage since they were generated basis Retrieval-Augmented Generation to address users’ queries.
Meet the Picklers
Sneha Jain, Snehima Jauhari, Anirudh Bhatia, Srishti Dhoundiyal, Kuber Mahajan, Pushpit Ghosh, Harsshita Pothiraj, Devika Tiwari, Affan Moin and Aditya Singh Thakur.
