Someone Copied Your Product Design in India: What You Can Actually Do

You are scrolling a marketplace and there it is. Your chair. Your bottle. Your luminaire. Same silhouette, same proportions, a different brand name, forty per cent cheaper, 312 reviews. Or you are at a trade fair and a stranger is standing behind a stand full of your product.

The first instinct is to send something furious. Resist it for a couple of hours, because what you do in those hours decides what you can do for the next two years.

Everything turns on one question, and it is not "how similar is it?" It is whether the design was registered in India before you started selling it. If it was, you have a statutory action with an injunction at the end of it. If it was not, you still have options — slower, more evidence-hungry ones — and you have probably lost the ability to register that design at all.

Quick answer

If the design is registered, unauthorised use is piracy under Section 22 of the Designs Act, 2000. You may recover a fixed sum as a contract debt — capped at ₹25,000 per contravention and ₹50,000 in total for any one design — or elect to sue for damages and an injunction, which is what almost everyone does. No such suit may be filed below the court of a District Judge.

If it is not registered, there is no design action at all; India has no unregistered design right. What remains is passing off, a narrow copyright argument that Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act, 1957 closes once the article has been made more than fifty times industrially, and contract or confidentiality claims where the copier was a supplier or an employee.

Before you think of registering now: India has no grace period. If the product is already on sale or published, Section 4(b) has very likely destroyed its novelty.

First 48 hours: evidence

Listings vanish. The moment a legal notice lands, a careful copier edits the listing, swaps the photographs, or deletes it and relists under a new seller account. Evidence gathered after that letter is worth a fraction of evidence gathered before it. So, before you write to anyone:

• Dated screenshots of the whole listing — images, title, description, price, seller name, ratings, review count and review dates — with the URL visible in the frame.
• A test purchase in a company name, with a tax invoice. The invoice gives you the seller's legal entity name and GSTIN, which marketplace display names do not.
• The article itself, kept aside and undisturbed, plus the seller's other listings. A court will be comparing two objects; keep one pristine.
• Your own dates — first sale invoice, first catalogue, registration certificate, renewal receipts. You must prove your priority, not only their copying.

At a trade fair the equivalents are photographs of the stand with signage visible, the brochure, a business card and the organiser's exhibitor listing.

What a registered design covers

Section 2(d) defines a design as features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornament or composition of lines or colours applied to an article, judged "solely by the eye". It expressly excludes any mode or principle of construction, anything that is in substance a mere mechanical device, a trade mark, a property mark, and an artistic work.

So design protection covers how your product looks. Not how it works, not what it is called, not the engineering behind it. A competitor who takes your latch mechanism and gives it a different shape has not committed design piracy. One who copies the shape and puts their own brand on it has. Under Section 6(3) a design may also be registered in not more than one class, so a copy appearing in a different Locarno class raises a real question rather than an automatic case. If you are unsure which right you are actually holding, what protects what is the shortest route to an answer.

Check, too, that the registration is alive. Under Section 11 copyright in a registered design runs ten years from the date of registration, extendable by five — but only on an application made before the ten years expire, in Form 3 under Rule 23 of the Designs Rules, 2001 (government fee ₹2,000 for a natural person, startup or small entity; ₹8,000 for others). If it lapses, Section 12 allows restoration within one year on Form 4, with a verified statement explaining the failure to pay. After that, nothing.

Section 22 piracy

Section 22(1) makes three things unlawful during the life of the design, without the proprietor's licence or written consent: applying the design "or any fraudulent or obvious imitation thereof" to an article in the registered class for the purpose of sale; importing for sale such an article; and publishing or exposing for sale such an article, knowing the design or an imitation was applied without consent.

Note the third limb. A marketplace seller who manufactured nothing but lists and sells the copy falls squarely within it once knowledge can be shown — which is what a well-drafted notice establishes. And "fraudulent or obvious imitation" is wider than identity: because the design is judged by the eye, small cosmetic changes made to escape liability usually do not help.

Section 22(2) then offers a choice for every contravention.

Those figures were fixed in 2000 and never revised. ₹50,000 does not cover the cost of drafting the plaint, so serious design owners elect clause (b) — the point is almost never the money. It is the injunction, and the leverage a court order gives you across every channel the copier sells through.

The second proviso to Section 22(2) bars any such suit below the court of District Judge. Design disputes are also commercial disputes under Section 2(1)(c)(xvii) of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, so once the Specified Value is met — not less than ₹3 lakh since the 2018 amendment — the suit goes to a Commercial Court or Commercial Division.

The defence you must expect

This is why a weak registration is worse than no strategy at all.

Section 22(3): in any suit for relief under Section 22(2), every ground on which the registration may be cancelled under Section 19 is available as a ground of defence. Those grounds are prior registration in India; publication in India or in any other country before registration; that the design is not new or original; that it is not registrable under the Act; or that it is not a design as defined in Section 2(d).

So the defendant need not show they did not copy. They can concede the resemblance and argue your registration should never have been granted. Under Section 22(4), once a Section 19 ground is pleaded as a defence, the suit must be transferred to the High Court — which changes your timeline, your costs and your counsel. Cancellation can also be pursued separately by petition to the Controller on Form 8 under Rule 29, with an appeal to the High Court under Section 19(2). Expect a well-resourced copier to do both.

What makes a registration survive is decided years earlier, at filing: a statement of novelty (Rule 12) identifying what is actually new — the shape of the backrest, say — rather than a blanket claim to the whole article that invites a knock-out on one prior design; the correct Locarno class and article definition (Rule 10); clean, consistent views; and filing before disclosure. The design registration guide covers all four.

The novelty trap, correctly stated

You will read in various places that India gives designers a two-year window to file after showing a product. It does not. There is no two-year grace period in Indian design law, and no twelve-month one either.

Section 4(b) bars registration of a design that "has been disclosed to the public anywhere in India or in any other country by publication in tangible form or by use or in any other way prior to the filing date, or where applicable, the priority date". Anywhere. By use. In any other way. A design is therefore very likely no longer registrable once you have launched the product, listed it anywhere online, shown it at a trade fair, posted photographs on social media, or had it registered or published in another country's design register.

Two narrow reliefs exist, and neither is a grace period. Section 16 protects disclosure by the proprietor in circumstances making it contrary to good faith for the recipient to use or publish the design, provided registration follows — so the NDA'd conversation with a mould-maker or an investor is safe. A launch is not. Section 21 provides that exhibiting at an exhibition to which the Central Government has extended the section by notification in the Official Gazette does not destroy novelty, but only if the exhibitor gives the Controller previous notice in the prescribed form (Form 9) and files within six months of first exhibiting. Both conditions, and the exhibition must actually be notified.

Section 44 separately gives a six-month convention priority window from a first filing abroad — a priority right for people who already filed, not a grace period for people who already sold.

Indian exporters get this wrong because their other markets work differently.

One change on the horizon. DPIIT is reported to have issued a Concept Note on amending the Designs Act, 2000, dated 23 January 2026, proposing a 12-month grace period, protection for GUIs and other screen-based designs, deferred publication for up to 30 months, a 5+5+5 renewal structure, and statutory damages up to ₹50 lakh for wilful infringement. We have not been able to find the Concept Note on DPIIT's own site, and as at 20 August 2026 none of it is law. Plan against Section 4(b) as it stands.

If it is not registered

No registration means no Section 22 action. What you have is this.

Passing off

A common-law action protecting reputation rather than the design as such. You must establish goodwill in the get-up — that Indian buyers actually associate this shape or trade dress with your business — misrepresentation likely to cause confusion, and damage.

Shape and trade dress can found a passing off action in India, and the position was settled recently in the rights owner's favour. In Crocs Inc USA v. Bata India & Ors (Delhi High Court, Division Bench of C. Hari Shankar and Ajay Digpaul JJ, 1 July 2025, RFA(OS)(Comm) 22/2019), the court restored Crocs' passing off suits and held that a plaintiff need not base its passing off case on "something more" than the subject matter of its design claim. Special leave petitions by Bata and Liberty were dismissed by the Supreme Court on 14 November 2025. Read it as a ruling on maintainability — the suits were restored for trial, not decided.

For a registered proprietor, Carlsberg Breweries A/S v. Som Distilleries and Breweries Ltd (Delhi High Court, five-judge Full Bench, 14 December 2018, CS(COMM) 690/2018) is the companion: one composite suit may join design infringement and passing off against the same defendant where both arise from the same transaction.

The candid part: goodwill in a shape is hard and expensive to prove. Sales figures, advertising spend, unsolicited press and instances of actual confusion all have to be assembled. A brand eighteen months old with one hero product will struggle. A brand with six years of national distribution and a recognisable silhouette will not.

Copyright, and the fifty-article rule

Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act, 1957 provides that copyright in any design capable of being registered under the Designs Act but not so registered ceases as soon as any article to which it has been applied has been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process by the owner or with the owner's licence.

Set that against a manufacturing business. Fifty units is a pilot run. Any product genuinely sold is past it. The sketch that became your chair may well have been an artistic work with copyright the day it was drawn — and lost it somewhere around unit fifty-one.

The Supreme Court mapped the boundary in Cryogas Equipment Pvt. Ltd. v. Inox India Ltd., 2025 INSC 483, decided 15 April 2025 by Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh JJ. First: is the work an original artistic work protected by copyright, or a design derived from an artistic work and industrially applied, so that Section 15(2) bites? Second: if copyright does not subsist, apply a functional utility test — where the dominant purpose is utilitarian, design protection must be independently earned, not assumed.

Technical drawings. The engineering drawing itself may still enjoy copyright as an artistic work. That is a strong claim against someone who copies your drawings, which is what happens in supplier and ex-employee disputes — and a much weaker one against someone who bought your product, measured it and drew their own. Copyright in a drawing restrains copying of the drawing; it does not give you a back-door monopoly on the industrially applied shape.

The claims people forget

If the copier was a contract manufacturer, mould supplier, distributor or former employee, your strongest case may not be an IP case at all. Breach of contract, breach of confidence and misuse of technical information move faster and do not depend on a registration. Pull the NDA before you pull the design certificate.

Registered versus unregistered

The remedies menu

1. Evidence, then position. Covered above, and alongside it confirm your registration number, class, article definition, ownership chain and renewal status. Never assert a right you have not checked.

2. Marketplace takedown. Faster and cheaper than a court, and usually first. Be realistic about what platforms want. Amazon Brand Registry in India requires an active registered or pending trade mark for your brand name or logo — a design registration alone will not enrol you. Its "Report a Violation" tool then lets enrolled brands report suspected trade mark, copyright and patent violations, and registered designs are handled through that patent lane. Flipkart runs an equivalent rights-holder process. All of them, in practice, want a registration number and a certificate. If you have no trade mark on the brand name, this is the gap to close first.

Two legal levers sit behind platform policy. Under the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, the grievance officer must acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and dispose of it within 15 days (Rule 3(2)(a)); and on a court order or government notification, the intermediary must remove or disable access within 36 hours (Rule 3(1)(d)). That second duty is triggered by a court order — one reason an interim injunction is worth more than it looks.

3. Cease and desist, carefully. A good notice identifies the registration by number and class, attaches the certificate, identifies the specific listings or SKUs, states the acts complained of in the language of Section 22(1), and demands stop, withdrawal, an account of units sold, disclosure of suppliers and delivery up. Copy it to the marketplace.

A bad notice creates a claim against you. Section 23 of the Designs Act applies the Patents Act, 1970 provisions on groundless threats to registered designs, importing Section 106 of the Patents Act: a person aggrieved by groundless threats may sue for a declaration that the threats are unjustifiable, an injunction, and damages. Your defence is that the acts threatened would in fact infringe. Note the carve-out — mere notification of the existence of a registration is not a threat. Write to the infringer; be far more careful about writing to their customers.

4. Suit, where the copy is significant, the copier is solvent and the registration is sound:

• Forum and mediation. Not below a District Judge, and a Commercial Court or Commercial Division once the ₹3 lakh Specified Value is met. Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act requires pre-institution mediation unless the suit contemplates urgent interim relief — design cases nearly always do, which is why most are filed straight.
• Interim injunction under Order XXXIX Rules 1 and 2 CPC is the real prize. Your certificate is the prima facie case; the cancellation attack is what threatens it.
• Local commissioner appointments under Order XXVI Rule 9 CPC — India's Anton Piller equivalent — to visit premises, inventory or seize infringing stock and secure records before they disappear. Sought ex parte with the injunction, and often the most valuable order in the case. John Doe (Ashok Kumar) orders help where the same copy rotates through fresh seller accounts.
• Timelines and cost. A written statement must be filed within 120 days of service in a commercial suit, after which the right is forfeited. Interim relief can come in weeks; a decree after trial takes years. Budget in lakhs, not thousands.

5. Customs, for imports only. Designs remain recordable with Indian Customs under the IPR (Imported Goods) Enforcement Rules, 2007, through the ICeR portal. Patents were removed from those Rules by Notification No. 56/2018-Customs (N.T.) dated 22 June 2018 (G.S.R. 581(E)); trade marks, copyrights, designs and geographical indications remain. Recordation needs an indemnity bond and security, works at the border, and does nothing about a domestic manufacturer.

72 hours after finding the copy

A hypothetical scenario, written to show sequence. It is not a MYCrave client matter.

A Pune D2C furniture brand sells a moulded lounge chair with a distinctive scalloped backrest — its bestseller for two years. On a Tuesday morning the founder finds it on a marketplace at 45 per cent of their price, sold by a Rajkot seller whose reviews go back four months.

Hours 0–8. Screenshots with the URL visible, the storefront and the seller's other twelve listings. A test purchase on the company account. Someone pulls the design file: Form 1 filed in 2023, registration granted, class checked, renewal not yet due. The statement of novelty reads "the novelty resides in the shape and configuration of the backrest as illustrated" — narrow, specific, and far harder to cancel than a claim to the whole chair.

Hours 8–24. Counsel compares the two products. The copy has a different leg splay and no branding, but on the eye test the backrest is the same. That is enough to be a fraudulent or obvious imitation.

Hours 24–48. A platform IP complaint goes in citing the registration number with the certificate attached, and a cease and desist goes to the seller — identifying the registration, the listing and the Section 22(1)(a) and (c) acts, demanding withdrawal, an account of units sold and disclosure of the manufacturer. Nothing goes to the seller's customers.

Hours 48–72. The test purchase arrives with a tax invoice naming a private limited company and a GSTIN — a manufacturer, not a trader. One listing has become a supply chain, and counsel starts a commercial suit with an interim injunction application and a local commissioner to visit the Rajkot premises.

The two decisions that made this possible were taken in 2023: they filed before launch, and somebody wrote a careful statement of novelty.

When suing is the wrong answer

• The copy is different enough. If the resemblance sits at the level of category convention — round table, tapered lamp, kraft carton — you may be trying to monopolise a shape nobody can own.
• The registration is vulnerable. If the product was launched, exhibited or posted before the filing date, Section 4(b) is sitting there and Section 22(3) hands it to your opponent. Litigating a bad registration can cost you the registration, not just the case.
• The infringer is judgment-proof. A one-person seller with no assets will not pay your costs and will reappear under a new account. Takedowns and monitoring are the right tool.
• The maths does not work. If the copy is taking ₹6 lakh a year of margin and the contested interim stage costs more, you are buying deterrence, not damages. Sometimes that is worth buying — decide it deliberately.

Whether or not you sue, four things are worth doing now: register the next model before it launches; build a family of registrations across variants and sub-assemblies, since a portfolio is much harder to design around than a single filing; get a trade mark on the brand name, because trade mark rights are what unlock marketplace brand-protection programmes; and monitor, so copies are caught while the listing is small and the seller is still willing to walk away.

How MYCrave can help

MYCrave Consultancy & Services works on designs at volume — the firm reports 6,800+ design applications filed and 5,200+ designs registered, alongside 2,500+ design objection replies. On a matter like this the useful deliverables are specific:

• A candid infringement assessment — your registration and the copy compared on the statutory test, with a frank view of whether the registration would survive a Section 19 attack.
• A registration health check — class and article definition, statement of novelty, views, ownership chain and renewal status, so you know what you are holding before you spend on a notice.
• Novelty searching against the Designs Register before the next model is filed, so the filing you make is one you can enforce.
• Filing and prosecution of new and variant designs, plus portfolio monitoring so the next copy is found in week two rather than month six.

Where a matter needs litigation, MYCrave will say so and help you scope it — including the cases where the honest advice is to fix the portfolio and not to sue. See design registration and design portfolio support.

What to do this week

If the design is registered, the order is evidence, verification, takedown, notice, and only then a suit. If it is not, establish whether passing off is realistically open to you — then make sure the same thing cannot happen to your next product. Section 4(b) is unforgiving, but it bites only once per design, and you have another design coming.

Frequently asked questions

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