Delhi HC IP-Division Single Judge (Tejas Karia J.) upheld an interim injunction restraining Flipkart from using 'MARQ' and 'MARQ by Flipkart' for electronics, holding the mark phonetically, structurally and visually similar to prior-user Marc Enterprises' 'MARC' and that addition of the Flipkart house mark could not cure the deception.
On 29 May 2026, Justice Sachin Datta of the Delhi High Court delivered a 144-page judgment recognising the Right to be Forgotten as an integral facet of informational privacy under Article 21 and laying down a workable framework for de-indexing judicial records.
In March 2026, a Delhi HC Division Bench dismissed an LPA arising from a denied EWS/DG admission, holding that Article 21A and the RTE Act 2009 do not confer a constitutional right to admission in a particular school of choice once the academic year has ended and an alternative seat has been allotted.
On 19 April 2021, Justice Pratibha M. Singh of the Delhi High Court held that Section 21(4) of the Mental Healthcare Act 2017 imposes a positive, justiciable statutory obligation on every insurer to provide mental-illness cover on the same basis as physical illness, and that any policy clause excluding or sub-limiting mental-illness cover is void to the extent of inconsistency with the Act. The judgment directed National Insurance to reimburse the petitioner's Rs.5.54 lakh schizoaffective-disorder claim and required the IRDAI to circulate the order to every insurer. It was the doctrinal foundation for the IRDAI's 18 October 2022 circular and for the 2024 Master Circular on Health Insurance Business.
On 18 May 2026 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, in Bansal v. Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV, set aside the 2018 single-judge SEP infringement decree by Justice Manmohan on Philips' DVD-related Indian Patent IN 184753 and articulated, for the first time at the Division Bench level in India, the evidentiary baseline a Standard-Essential Patent holder must meet at trial. The DB held that essentiality is a fact requiring proof through claim-charts mapped to the standard and through cross-examinable witnesses; that Philips' right was exhausted under Section 107A(b) of the Patents Act 1970 because the DVD components had been put on the market in China by Philips' authorised licensees; and that comparable-licence evidence is required to discharge the FRAND-rate burden. The ruling resets the FRAND-evidence architecture for the Ericsson, Nokia, Dolby and Malikie actions still on foot.
On 2 November 2018, Pratibha M. Singh, J. of the Delhi High Court held that the luxury reseller darveys.com was not a passive intermediary under Section 79 of the Information Technology Act 2000 and could not claim the safe-harbour against trade-mark infringement. The judgment enumerated some twenty-six indicia of active involvement — paid membership, curated marketplace, control over which sellers could list, authenticity guarantees, logistics handling, non-disclosure of seller identities and use of the Louboutin name and Mr. Louboutin's image as meta-tags. A close reading of the active-versus-passive intermediary test under Section 79 read with Rule 3 of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules 2011, the post-judgment doctrinal arc through Amazon Seller v. Modicare and the Division Bench gloss on Amway v. 1MG.
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.
On 29 March 2023 a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, in Intex Technologies (India) Ltd v. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, delivered the country's first authoritative appellate framework on standard-essential patents and FRAND licensing. The judgment by Justices Manmohan and Saurabh Banerjee dismissed Intex's appeal, allowed Ericsson's cross-appeal, doubled the royalty security ordered by the Single Judge, held that injunctions and pro-tem royalty deposits are available to SEP holders against unwilling licensees, ruled that parallel CCI proceedings do not oust Patent Act jurisdiction, and established the 'willing licensee' inquiry as the central test in Indian SEP litigation. A close reading of the Bench's reasoning, the two-way street it builds between SEP holders and implementers, and the bespoke Indian remedy of pro-tem security that now travels through Nokia v. OPPO, Ericsson v. Lava and the wider Delhi SEP docket.
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.
On 2 July 2009, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court — A.P. Shah CJ and S. Muralidhar J — read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code to exclude consensual sexual acts between adults in private. The judgment articulated, for the first time in Indian constitutional law, sexual orientation as an analogous ground under Article 15, deployed Article 21 to protect sexual autonomy in the personal sphere, recast Article 14 around effect-based discrimination, and drew the distinction between constitutional morality and popular morality. The Supreme Court overruled it in Suresh Kumar Koushal in December 2013; nearly five years later, the five-judge bench in Navtej Singh Johar vindicated the reasoning. A close reading of the 2009 doctrinal moment and the procedural arc that followed.