In a dispute involving intersection of copyright and design laws, the Supreme Court of India has formulated a two-pronged approach to solve the conundrum caused by Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act, 1957, to ascertain whether a work is qualified to be protected by the Designs Act, 2000.
Accordingly, it was held that the first test shall consider whether the work in question is purely an ‘artistic work’ entitled to protection under the Copyright Act or whether it is a ‘design’ derived from such original artistic work and subjected to an industrial process. As a second step, the Apex Court advises that if such a work does not qualify for copyright protection, then the test of ‘functional utility’ will have to be applied to determine its dominant purpose and then ascertain whether it would qualify for design protection under the Design Act.
Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act provides that design, which is capable of registration under the Designs Act, but is not registered so, will lose its protection under the former Act if the article to which the design has been applied is reproduced more than 50 times by an industrial process. The crux of the issue was whether Proprietary Engineering Drawings are correctly classifiable as either a ‘design’ under the Designs Act or an ‘artistic work’ under the Copyright Act.
The Supreme Court in Cryogas Equipment Private Limited v. Inox India Limited and Others [Judgement dated 15 April 2025] also observed that it must be kept in mind that the overarching objective is to ensure that rights granted under either regime serve their intended purpose without unduly encroaching upon the domain of the other. It in this regard noted that the legislative intent is to harmonise the two statutes so that while an ‘artistic work’ qualifies for copyright protection, its commercial or industrial application—i.e., the ‘design’ derived from the original work for industrial production— is subject to the limitations set out in Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act.
The Apex Court thus directed the Commercial Court to consider the issue afresh and conduct trial by adopting Occam’s Razor approach to ascertain the true nature of the ‘Proprietary Engineering Drawings’.