Challenges Of Intellectual Property In India’s Fashion Industry: Comparative Analysis Of Copyright, Design And Trademark Protection
- IJLLR Journal
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Vidhi Sharma, Dept. of Law, Prestige Institute of Management and Research, Indore.
Ishita Tripathi, Dept. of Law, Prestige Institute of Management and Research, Indore.
ABSTRACT
Indian fashion industry has become one of the most fast-growing branches of the national economy supported by the innovative creativity, the classical artisanship, and growing markets around the world. The booming nature of this business has, however, also revealed serious flaws with the intellectual property (IP) protection system that regulates fashion designs. The paper will critically evaluate the effectiveness of the Indian legal regime to safeguard the intellectual property related to fashion using the Copyright Act, 1957, the Designs Act, 2000, and the Trademarks Act, 1999. It states that even though these laws in total offer a theoretical basis of protection, they are usually applied in practices in structural overlaps and protection lapses, especially in relation to mass-produced fashion designs and the fast-fashion business model. In the article, there is a struggle between copyright and design protection by Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act that leads to the premature loss of copyright by the occurrence of the industrial reproduction of the designs. Along with it the paper also considers issues of enforcement like digital counterfeiting, procedural delays of civil redress, and weak deterrence of criminal prosecution. By making a comparative study with other legal systems in the United States and the European Union, including those of unregistered design rights and statutory damages, the paper finds that there are significant gaps in the system that exists in India. It ends with recommendations of legislative and procedural changes that would enhance the protection of intellectual property in the fast-changing fashion sector in India.
Keywords: Intellectual Property, Fashion Industry, Fast Fashion, Counterfeiting, Copyrights.
