On 10 April 2026, Justice Tushar Rao Gedela of the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte ad interim injunction restraining a Bhopal-based publisher from using 'The Pioneer' trademark and from copying the contents of the plaintiff's newspaper. The judgment, in CS(COMM) 338/2026, treats the defendant's conduct — following the revocation of a 2004 Memorandum of Understanding — as a composite trademark-and-copyright infringement under the Trade Marks Act, 1999 and the Copyright Act, 1957. A digest of the facts, the relief, and what the order tells practitioners about the interim-injunction architecture in newspaper IP matters.
On 9 December 2016, the Delhi High Court Division Bench — Pradeep Nandrajog, J. and Yogesh Khanna, J. — held that Section 52(1)(i) of the Copyright Act 1957, which permits reproduction of any work by a teacher or a pupil in the course of instruction, is to be read purposively and broadly and is not confined to physical classroom acts. Course-pack preparation by a university for its students falls within Section 52(1)(i) provided the inclusion is justified by the purpose of instruction. The DB articulated a fairness test rooted in the extent justified by purpose — qualitative and quantitative — and declined to transplant the US four-factor fair-use test. The suit was restored to the single judge for fact-trial; the publishers withdrew it on 9 March 2017.
The May 2026 cycle in Indian intellectual-property law has produced three doctrinal threads running in parallel — the Division Bench reset of the SEP-evidence architecture in Bansal v. Philips and the parallel pro-tem FRAND security in Malikie v. Xiaomi; the Delhi High Court DB's close-out of the Ilaiyaraaja-Saregama composer-rights line under the pre-1994 Copyright Act architecture; and the Calcutta High Court's first Indian engagement with the generative-AI/IP interface in Indiamart v. OpenAI. Read alongside Syngenta on agrochemical polymorphism and Section 3(d), Orient Electric on Designs Act anticipation discipline, Médecins Sans Frontières on trade-mark use in fictional film content, Indian Explosives on Section 12A pre-institution mediation in copyright suits, Communication Components Antenna on antenna-patent damages quantum, and Ars Steels on procedural fairness at the Designs Controller, the cycle discloses the operational architecture within which Indian IP practice now operates.
On 23 December 2016 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, in MySpace Inc v. Super Cassettes Industries Ltd, set aside Justice Manmohan Singh's blanket 2011 injunction and worked out the first coherent Indian framework for intermediary safe-harbour in copyright. The DB held that the proviso to Section 81 of the IT Act does not preclude an intermediary from invoking the Section 79 safe-harbour in copyright suits; that 'actual knowledge' under Section 51(a)(ii) of the Copyright Act requires knowledge of specific infringing material at a specific URL; that takedown notices must identify works with specificity, location and ownership; and that no general proactive monitoring obligation can be imposed.