Designs and Copyright: The Overlap and Section 15

1. The problem

A drawing of a sofa pattern is an artistic work under section 2(c) of the Copyright Act, protected for the author’s life plus sixty years without registration. The same pattern printed on thousands of metres of upholstery fabric is a design, protected for at most fifteen years and only if registered. If copyright survived industrial application, nobody would bother registering designs and industrial products would carry a monopoly of a century. The law therefore draws a line.

2. The statutory scheme

Section 15 of the Copyright Act, 1957 (as amended to refer to the Designs Act, 2000):

1. Copyright shall not subsist under the Copyright Act in any design which is registered under the Designs Act (section 15(1)).
2. Copyright in any design which is capable of being registered under the Designs Act but has not been registered shall cease as soon as any article to which the design has been applied has been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process by the owner of the copyright or, with his licence, by any other person (section 15(2)).

On the designs side, section 2(d) excludes “any artistic work as defined in clause (c) of section 2 of the Copyright Act” from the definition of design. Read together, the original artistic work stays in copyright; what it becomes when applied to an article industrially is a design.

3. Microfibres Inc. v. Girdhar & Co. (Delhi High Court, 2009)

Microfibres made upholstery fabrics with printed patterns and sued for infringement of copyright in the patterns as artistic works. The single judge (2006) and the Division Bench (2009) dismissed the claim. The Division Bench held:

• The original artistic work, such as a painting or drawing that may later inspire a design, retains full copyright protection.
• But where a work is created with the intention of applying it to an article by an industrial process, and is so applied, what is protected is the design, and the Designs Act applies.
• The patterns had been applied to fabric commercially far more than fifty times and were never registered, so under section 15(2) copyright had ceased. Microfibres had no remedy.

The judgment insists on the purpose of creation: a work made for industrial use is a design from the start, even if it is also, in form, a drawing.

4. Later High Court decisions

• Rajesh Masrani v. Tahiliani Design Pvt. Ltd. (Delhi High Court, Division Bench, 2008): hand-embroidered garment designs were treated as artistic works, and since the defendant had not shown industrial reproduction beyond fifty copies, copyright protection was available at the interim stage.
• Ritika Pvt. Ltd. v. Biba Apparels Pvt. Ltd. (Delhi High Court, 2016): garment sketches by a fashion house had been used to make garments in large numbers; as unregistered designs reproduced more than fifty times, copyright had ceased.

5. Cryogas Equipment v. Inox India (Supreme Court, 2025)

In Cryogas Equipment Private Limited v. Inox India Limited, 2025 INSC 483, Inox sued for copyright infringement in engineering drawings and the literary and artistic content of its designs for cryogenic tanks and LNG trailers. The defendants sought rejection of the plaint, arguing that the drawings were designs reproduced industrially, so section 15(2) had ended copyright. The trial court and High Court refused. The Supreme Court set aside those orders and remitted the matter, laying down a two-step approach:

1. First, ask whether the work is a purely artistic work protected under the Copyright Act, or a design derived from such a work and applied to an article by an industrial process.
2. Second, if the work does not qualify as a design under section 2(d), apply a functional utility test: is the article’s shape or configuration primarily functional, or is it chosen for its appeal to the eye? A work whose value lies in function falls outside both copyright and design, and belongs, if anywhere, to patent law.

The Court approved the Microfibres distinction between the original artistic work and its industrial application and treated the question as one of mixed fact and law, unsuitable for summary rejection of the plaint.

6. Comparative law

• United Kingdom. Section 51 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 says it is not an infringement of copyright in a design document for anything other than an artistic work to make an article to the design. Section 52 once limited copyright in industrially exploited artistic works to twenty-five years; it was repealed in 2016 after the EU ruling in Flos (2011), which held that member states could not deny copyright to designs that met the copyright standard.
• European Union. In Cofemel v. G-Star Raw (CJEU, 2019) the Court held that designs are protected by copyright if they are original in the sense of the author’s own intellectual creation; member states may not add an aesthetic threshold. Brompton Bicycle v. Chedech/Get2Get (CJEU, 2020) added that a shape dictated by technical function is not protected unless it reflects free and creative choices. The EU therefore allows cumulation.
• United States. Copyright protects pictorial, graphic and sculptural features of a useful article only if they are separable. In Star Athletica, L.L.C. v. Varsity Brands, Inc. (US Supreme Court, 2017) the Court held that the stripes and chevrons on cheerleading uniforms could be perceived as two-dimensional works apart from the uniform and so were eligible for copyright.

7. Writing the answer

1. State the problem of dual protection and the policy reasons.
2. Set out section 15(1)–(2) and the exclusion in section 2(d).
3. Explain Microfibres and apply the fifty-copies rule.
4. Give Cryogas as the current Supreme Court position.
5. Compare UK (no cumulation for design documents), EU (cumulation) and US (separability).
6. Close with reform: an unregistered design right for India, or a clearer statutory test.

How this is examined

A 16-mark essay on the relationship between copyright and design law, or a short note on section 15. A problem may describe a fashion designer whose sketches are copied after her garments have sold in large numbers: she has no copyright under section 15(2) unless the designs were registered, and her only other route is passing off if the garments carry recognisable trade dress.