Intellectual property in May 2026: the SEP-jurisprudence reset, the composer-rights close-out and the generative-AI interface

The May 2026 cycle in Indian intellectual-property law has been one of the most doctrinally dense months in recent memory. Three threads run through the cycle. The first is the Division Bench reset of the SEP-evidence architecture in Bansal v. Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV (DHC DB, 18 May 2026, Hari Shankar and Om Prakash Shukla, JJ.), discussed in a standalone digest — together with the parallel pro-tem FRAND security order in Malikie Innovations v. Xiaomi Corporation (DHC SJ, 30 April 2026), the FRAND-evidence baseline now operates against a substantially more demanding standard than the one that obtained at the start of the cycle. The second is the Delhi High Court Division Bench's close-out of the Ilaiyaraaja v. Saregama composer-rights line — the most consequential composer-royalty pronouncement under the pre-1994 Copyright Act architecture since the 2012 Amendment debates began. The third is the Calcutta High Court's first Indian engagement with the generative-AI / IP interface in Indiamart Inter Mesh v. OpenAI, in a ruling that characterises ChatGPT as an "originator" not a transmitter and rejects any vested right to "visibility" on a competitor's LLM. Read with Syngenta Crop Protection AG v. Controller of Patents on the Section 3(d) polymorphism question, Orient Electric v. Crompton Greaves on Designs Act anticipation discipline, Médecins Sans Frontières v. Dharma Productions on trade-mark use in fictional film content, Indian Explosives v. Ideal Detonators on Section 12A pre-institution mediation in copyright suits, Communication Components Antenna Inc. v. Rosenberger Hochfrequenztechnik on antenna-patent damages quantum, and Ars Steels and Alloy International v. Controller of Patents and Designs on procedural fairness at the Controller, the cycle discloses the operational architecture within which Indian IP practice now operates.

Ilaiyaraaja v. Saregama India Ltd — the pre-1994 composer-rights close-out

On 21 May 2026, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court (C. Hari Shankar, J. and Om Prakash Shukla, J.) delivered Ilaiyaraaja v. Saregama India Ltd, 2026 SCC OnLine Del 3846. The dispute concerned the composer's claim to royalties under Section 13(4) of the Copyright Act 1957 on the exploitation of his musical compositions embedded in films produced before the 1994 Amendment. The DB's holding is structurally clean: the composer's Section 13(4) rights subsist in the musical work alone; the sound recording and the lyrics, under the pre-1994 architecture, vest in the producer — in this case Saregama by an assignment of 1980 — by operation of Section 17(b) and (c) read with the pre-1994 proviso governing cinematograph works.

The reasoning is doctrinal and historical. The 2012 Amendment introduced the Section 18(1) proviso that an author of a work included in a cinematograph film cannot assign or waive his right to receive royalties for utilisation of the work in any form other than as part of the film. The Amendment carried prospective effect — it did not retrospectively re-architect the pre-1994 assignment universe under which film-music compositions had been contracted out to production companies in the preceding decades. Ilaiyaraaja — a composer whose principal body of work was created well before the Amendment — fell on the pre-1994 side of the temporal line. His musical-work rights subsist; his rights in the sound recording and the lyrics, on the facts of the 1980 assignment, do not.

The judgment closes out a debate that has run through the post-2012 commercial-rights architecture. Composers and lyricists whose works were assigned to producers in the pre-1994 contracting universe have sought to argue that the 2012 Amendment's policy reach extends retrospectively to recover royalty rights. The DB's reasoning forecloses that argument on the Ilaiyaraaja facts, and the reasoning is structurally generalisable. The pre-1994 universe is governed by the pre-1994 architecture; the Section 18(1) proviso governs the post-2012 universe; the temporal line is the operative discipline.

Malikie Innovations v. Xiaomi Corporation — pro-tem FRAND security against the Bansal v. Philips baseline

On 30 April 2026, a single judge of the Delhi High Court delivered an order in Malikie Innovations v. Xiaomi Corporation directing Xiaomi to deposit, or to provide a bank guarantee for, approximately ₹272 crores as pro-tem FRAND security in respect of Malikie's asserted 4G/5G implementing patents. The order continues the pro-tem deposit line that the Delhi High Court has been building since Nokia v. OPPO and Ericsson v. Lava International — security against potentially licensable use of the patented techniques, pending substantive determination of essentiality, infringement and FRAND rate.

The order is now positioned against the Bansal v. Philips baseline. The pro-tem deposit at the interim stage is secured on the Intex prima facie framework; the substantive trial, when it gets there, will be conducted against the Bansal v. Philips evidentiary architecture. The implementer's strategic exposure is to balance the pro-tem deposit cost against the post-Bansal prospect of contesting essentiality, working with Section 107A(b) exhaustion arguments where Xiaomi components originate from authorised manufacturers, and demanding comparable-licence evidence at trial. The working assumption that pro-tem deposit cases will largely settle before trial is being recalibrated as Bansal v. Philips lowers the implementer's trial-stage risk and raises the SEP holder's trial-stage burden.

Syngenta Crop Protection AG v. Controller of Patents — the agrochemical-polymorphism Section 3(d) recalibration

On 4 May 2026, a single judge of the Delhi High Court set aside the Patent Office's refusal of a Syngenta Crop Protection AG hydrate-form claim on an agrochemical compound. The Controller had rejected the claim on the Section 3(d) ground — that a new form of a known substance which does not result in enhanced efficacy is not patentable. The Court's reasoning, applied to the agrochemical context, held that unpredictable polymorphism (the unpredictable propensity of the compound to form different crystalline structures) and enhanced thermal stability collectively constitute enhanced efficacy within the Section 3(d) meaning where the underlying compound is an agrochemical functioning in field conditions.

The doctrinal contribution is to narrow the routine application of Section 3(d) to crystalline-form claims. Novartis AG v. Union of India, (2013) 6 SCC 1, had articulated the "enhanced therapeutic efficacy" gloss in the pharma context, where the relevant efficacy measure is the substance's interaction with biological targets. Syngenta extends the analytical move to the agrochemical context, where the relevant efficacy measure is the substance's performance in field conditions — including its thermal stability through transport and storage, and the predictability of its crystalline structure through the synthesis pathway. The gloss is not the same as the pharma-therapeutic gloss; but it is a domain-specific articulation of the Section 3(d) enhanced-efficacy standard that aligns with the policy of the provision while accommodating the specifics of the agrochemical use case.

Indiamart Inter Mesh v. OpenAI Inc. — the first Indian generative-AI / IP ruling

On 20 May 2026, the Calcutta High Court delivered its ruling in Indiamart Inter Mesh v. OpenAI Inc., the first Indian judicial engagement with the generative-AI / IP interface. Indiamart — a B2B marketplace — had complained that ChatGPT's responses to user queries about supplier discovery were displacing traffic to Indiamart's service. The relief sought was an interim injunction restraining OpenAI from including Indiamart in the corpus of its training data and from generating responses that referenced Indiamart or competed with its supplier-discovery proposition.

The Court declined interim relief. The reasoning rests on three propositions. First, ChatGPT is characterised as an "originator" — a substantive content-producing service whose outputs are its own product, rather than a transmitter mediating between content producers and consumers. The Section 79 safe-harbour architecture of the IT Act — which contemplates a transmitter or storage host — does not map onto a generative-AI service in any straightforward way, and the Indiamart complaint, which is structured against a transmitter-archetype, falls in the gap.

Second, no private entity has a vested right to "visibility" on a competitor's LLM. The user querying ChatGPT for supplier discovery is choosing to query ChatGPT rather than Indiamart; the choice is the user's, and the absence of Indiamart from ChatGPT's responses does not amount to an injury to Indiamart's legal rights any more than the absence of Indiamart from a search-engine result would. The market for supplier discovery is competitive; Indiamart's position in that market is to be maintained by competing for users, not by enjoining competitors.

Third, the training-data question — whether OpenAI's inclusion of Indiamart data in its training corpus constitutes a copyright infringement or an unfair business practice — is left open for substantive determination at trial. The Court declined to engage the question at the interim stage on the Indiamart record, observing that the question requires substantive consideration of the underlying training process, the nature of the use, and the application of the Section 52 fair-dealing architecture.

The ruling is the opening salvo of an AI-platform-versus-database-owner doctrinal arc that will be developed across multiple jurisdictions through the remainder of 2026 and into 2027. The Indian engagement is, on this first instance, relatively cautious — declining injunctive relief at the interim stage, leaving substantive doctrine for trial — but the framing of ChatGPT as an "originator" rather than a transmitter has substantive consequences for the safe-harbour architecture that the MySpace v. Super Cassettes line had developed in the UGC context.

Orient Electric v. Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals — Designs Act anticipation discipline

On 14 May 2026, a single judge of the Delhi High Court delivered Orient Electric v. Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals, granting an interim injunction against Crompton Greaves in respect of Orient's registered design for a ceiling-fan blade configuration. The doctrinal contribution is on the anticipation question. The Court held that under the Designs Act 2000, novelty cannot be assessed by mosaic-ing prior arts: each prior art is to be considered for anticipation as a whole, with the question being whether that single prior art discloses the suit design.

The reasoning brings Designs Act anticipation discipline closer to the patent-anticipation orthodoxy under the Patents Act 1970. The patent anticipation framework — anchored in the requirement that the prior art document disclose the claimed invention in such a way as to enable a person skilled in the art to carry it out — has long required single-document assessment. The Designs Act novelty question had, in pre-Orient practice, sometimes been argued on a composite basis — taking elements from multiple prior arts and assembling them into a "combined" prior-art mosaic that anticipated the suit design. The Court has now closed that argumentative pathway: novelty is to be assessed against each prior art in its own terms.

The ruling has practical implications for registered-design litigation. Defendants challenging design validity must now identify single prior arts that disclose the suit design; the mosaic approach is foreclosed. Plaintiffs, conversely, can more confidently rely on the registered design where the alleged anticipating prior arts are dispersed across multiple sources.

Médecins Sans Frontières v. Dharma Productions — trade-mark use in fictional film content

On 30 April 2026, a single judge of the Delhi High Court declined an interim injunction in Médecins Sans Frontières v. Dharma Productions. MSF had sought to restrain the use of its mark in a scene of a forthcoming Dharma Productions film depicting an illegal border crossing in a humanitarian-aid context. The Court's reasoning rests on the trade-mark-use threshold: the depiction of the MSF mark in a fictional film scene is unlikely to constitute use "in the course of trade" under Section 29 of the Trade Marks Act 1999 absent demonstrated commercial diversion or genuine source confusion.

The doctrinal contribution is to narrow trade-mark holders' leverage over creative content. Films, documentaries and other creative-content works that depict real-world brands in the course of their narrative do not, on the MSF reasoning, fall within the Section 29 infringement architecture unless the depiction crosses into commercial use — sponsorship, endorsement, product placement, or comparable commercial integration. The merely-depictive use is outside the trade-mark architecture, even where the brand-holder objects to the narrative context in which the depiction occurs.

The ruling is consistent with the trajectory of the post-Toyota v. Prius Auto Industries ((2018) 2 SCC 1) emphasis on territoriality and on use-in-trade as the operative trade-mark concepts. The Court reaffirms that the Trade Marks Act 1999 protects against commercial misappropriation; it does not supply a general right of brand-narrative control.

Indian Explosives v. Ideal Detonators — Section 12A pre-institution mediation in copyright suits

On 5 May 2026, a single judge of the Calcutta High Court delivered Indian Explosives v. Ideal Detonators, rejecting the plaintiff's attempt to bypass the Section 12A pre-institution mediation requirement of the Commercial Courts Act 2015 in a copyright suit between commercial competitors in the explosives sector. The plaintiff had argued — invoking the urgent-relief carve-out — that the pre-institution mediation requirement was satisfied by the existence of the alleged ongoing infringement. The Court rejected the argument on the facts and ruled that the suit could not be entertained without the mediation prerequisite being satisfied.

The doctrinal contribution is the extension of Patil Automation Pvt Ltd v. Rakheja Engineers Pvt Ltd, (2022) SC, to copyright commercial suits. Patil Automation — a Supreme Court ruling on the mandatory character of Section 12A — had established that the pre-institution mediation requirement is not a procedural formality but a substantive prerequisite. The Calcutta High Court has now applied that discipline in the copyright commercial-suit context, foreclosing the argument that intellectual-property commercial suits operate under a separate pre-institution architecture.

The practical consequence is that copyright plaintiffs in commercial-suit territory must, before filing, exhaust the pre-institution mediation process under the framework prescribed under Section 12A — or, where the urgent-relief carve-out is invoked, must establish on the pleadings that the urgency-of-relief test is met on facts that survive scrutiny. The latter pathway has, since Patil Automation, been narrow; the Indian Explosives ruling narrows it further in the copyright context.

Communication Components Antenna Inc. v. Rosenberger Hochfrequenztechnik — antenna-patent damages quantum

On 30 March 2026, a single judge of the Delhi High Court (Pratibha M. Singh, J.) delivered Communication Components Antenna Inc. v. Rosenberger Hochfrequenztechnik, 2026 SCC OnLine Del 1357, awarding Communication Components Antenna damages of approximately ₹152 crores together with a permanent injunction against Rosenberger in respect of CCAI's split-sector antenna patent for asymmetrical beam shaping. The damages computation rests on a lost-profits methodology reasoned against the Rosenberger v. Mobi Antenna line — including the Mobi Antenna matter in which an approximately ₹217 crore damages award had been made — and refined against the specific market and competition facts in the antenna-patent context.

The doctrinal contribution is on the damages methodology. The Court's articulation of the lost-profits framework — combining the patentee's market share, the implementer's sales volume in the patented technology, and the appropriately attributable profit margin — supplies a working template for substantial patent-damages awards in the post-Commercial Courts era. The ruling, together with the Mobi Antenna precedent, signals that the Indian patent-damages architecture has matured beyond the nominal-damages reluctance that characterised the early years of the Commercial Courts Act 2015 regime.

The judgment is also significant on the injunctive-relief side. The permanent injunction grant — read together with the substantial damages computation — places Rosenberger in a position where commercial continuation in the patented technology pathway is foreclosed in India absent a licence from CCAI. The ruling will inform the strategic calculus of subsequent antenna-patent and related telecommunications-component litigation.

Ars Steels and Alloy International v. Controller of Patents and Designs — procedural fairness at the Controller

On 7 May 2026, a single judge of the Calcutta High Court delivered Ars Steels and Alloy International v. Controller of Patents and Designs, setting aside the Controller's rejection of the appellant's design application and remanding the matter for fresh consideration. The Controller had refused the application without substantively engaging with the evidence the appellant had placed on the record. The Court held that the failure to assess the evidence amounted to a breach of procedural fairness, and that the rejection could not stand on a record on which the substantive merits had not been considered.

The judgment reaffirms a line that has run through Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. v. Controller of Patents and Agriboard International LLC v. Controller of Patents — that procedural-fairness discipline applies at the Controller's office no less than it applies in the courts. Where the Controller's order does not engage with the applicant's evidence or reasoning, the order is liable to be set aside on the procedural-fairness ground without engagement of the substantive merits. The remand discipline operates: the matter goes back to the Controller for fresh consideration on the full record.

The ruling is operationally important for design-applicant practice. Applicants whose applications are refused on inadequately-reasoned Controller orders have a clean appellate pathway: the procedural-fairness ground is independent of the substantive-merits ground and can be developed without the applicant having to win the substantive battle at the appellate stage.

The architecture, drawn together

Read together, the May 2026 cycle resets the operational architecture within which Indian IP practice runs. The SEP-evidence architecture — the question of what an SEP holder must prove at trial and how — has been recalibrated by Bansal v. Philips on the substantive side and is being tested against the pro-tem deposit architecture in Malikie v. Xiaomi on the interim side. The composer-royalty universe is being closed out at the Ilaiyaraaja DB level on the pre-1994 facts. The generative-AI / IP interface has been opened at Indiamart v. OpenAI with the originator-versus-transmitter framing and the no-vested-right-to-visibility proposition. Section 3(d)'s reach into agrochemical polymorphism has been narrowed by Syngenta. Designs Act anticipation has been disciplined by Orient Electric. Trade-mark use in fictional film content has been narrowed by Médecins Sans Frontières. Section 12A pre-institution mediation has been extended into the copyright commercial-suit universe by Indian Explosives. Patent-damages quantum at the lost-profits methodology has been pushed forward by Communication Components Antenna. And procedural fairness at the Controller has been reaffirmed by Ars Steels.

The architecture is not new in its individual components. What May 2026 has supplied is the simultaneous restatement of each, in a cycle now available as readily citable authority.

Related editorial pieces

• Bansal v. Koninklijke Philips: the first Division Bench reversal of a post-trial SEP infringement decree and the reset of the FRAND-evidence architecture
• Intex v. Ericsson and the SEP/FRAND framework: India's first authoritative Division Bench articulation
• Novartis AG v. Union of India: the enhanced therapeutic efficacy gloss on Section 3(d)
• Insolvency in May 2026: the IBBI omnibus, the IBC Amendment Act 2026 going operational, and the Supreme Court's real-estate course-correction
• Delhi HC on personality rights and the deepfake doctrine: the 2026 articulation
• Delhi HC on CMYK Printech: trade mark and copyright in commercial print and the architecture of pioneer-mark protection
• MySpace v. Super Cassettes: safe-harbour, actual knowledge and the URL-keyed notice framework