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हिन्दी — Read in HindiIntellectual property and Geographical Indications
Intellectual property in the news: patents and their disputes, copyright and new technology, trademarks, and the products that win Geographical Indication tags. Prelims has asked which products hold Geographical Indication tags and why India enacted the Geographical Indications Act.
Foundation note: Intellectual property rights
Geographical Indications
Copy link to Geographical IndicationsPrelims and Mains
A Geographical Indication (GI) is a tag registered to a region rather than to a firm, so a producers' body or a market committee holds it rather than any one grower.
- That makes the tag collective property, and whoever is written into the register decides who may lawfully sell under it.
- An application may be opposed within three months of its advertisement under the Act.
- The Intellectual Property Appellate Board was abolished in 2021, so GI disputes now go to slow civil courts.
What changed
11 Aug 2026New
- India has 724 registered GIs and only 42 per cent of them have any authorised user at all.
- In early 2026 the tags for Unjha jeera and saunf went to a market committee in Gujarat.
- About 40 million kg of counterfeit Darjeeling tea is sold worldwide, roughly ten times actual production.
Mains: the regime protects the place but not the producer; the reforms proposed are State enforcement cells, online monitoring and producer collectives.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2018: why India enacted the Geographical Indications Act, 1999
- Prelims 2015: which products hold Geographical Indication status
Traditional Knowledge Digital Library
Copy link to Traditional Knowledge Digital LibraryPrelims and Mains
The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library was set up in 2001 by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research with the Ministry of AYUSH.
- It holds over 5.2 lakh formulations from Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa and Yoga, translated so that foreign patent examiners can read them.
- It protects defensively, by documenting prior art so that patents are refused.
What changed
10 Jul 2026BriefIP Australia gained access, the eighteenth patent office to do so. PIB, 10 Jul 2026: India and Australia Sign Agreement on Access to Council of Scientific and Industrial Research’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (CSIR-TKDL) to Strengthen Protection of Traditional Knowledge (opens in a new tab)
Research integrity: fake patents and retractions
Copy link to Research integrity: fake patents and retractionsPrelims and Mains
Design applications are not examined for novelty, unlike patents, and cover how an object looks, not how it works.
- United States design patents need a novelty review; the United Kingdom, India and Australia issue design registrations with minimal review.
- Academics buy inventorship positions and present them as "international patents" for promotion.
- Experts blame rankings that count patents and papers without regard to quality.
- A retraction is the formal withdrawal of a published paper for error or misconduct, and the count of retractions is used as a measure of a country's research integrity.
- India ranks among the three countries with the most retractions.
Patent, US design patent, design registration
| Patent | Design patent (United States) | Design registration (United Kingdom, India, Australia) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it covers | The invention, how it works | How an object looks | How an object looks, not how it works |
| How it is examined | Examined for novelty and innovation | A novelty review | Minimal review; in the United Kingdom usually granted in about 11 days |
What changed
25 Jun 2026New
- A report in the International Journal of Educational Integrity says eight firms are likely selling thousands of United Kingdom registered designs, usually granted in about 11 days, to Indian academics to inflate their reputations.
Mains: Metric driven rankings of scientists and institutions fuel fake patents and fake papers.
Copyright in a machine generated work
Copy link to Copyright in a machine generated workPrelims and Mains
Copyright in a machine generated work turns on authorship: a copyright needs an author, and an author in Indian law is a person.
- Under Section 2(d)(vi) of the Copyright Act, 1957 the author of a computer generated work is the person who causes it to be created.
- Fair dealing is the limited set of uses of a copyrighted work the Act allows without the owner's consent, such as research and reporting.
- Whether training a model on copyrighted text falls within fair dealing is the question the courts are now answering.
What changed
2 Sep 2026
- India's Copyright Office refused to name the AI system DABUS as an author, holding that an author must be a person.
24 Jul 2026
- In a case brought by a news agency against OpenAI, the Delhi High Court took the prima facie view that storing copyrighted work to train a language model falls within fair dealing.
- Its reason was that training supplies the work to no third party; it took the same view of outputs produced by retrieval augmented generation, and the ruling is interim.