Almost everyone who arrives at a patent, copyright and trade mark comparison is asking one question in the wrong form. The question they ask is which right is strongest. Strength, in the abstract, is not a property any of the five Indian intellectual property rights possesses, because each right restrains a different kind of conduct by a different kind of defendant, and a right that is overwhelming against one act is silent against another. A patent can stop a competitor who never saw the invention, never copied anything, and built the same machine independently in another city. Copyright cannot touch that competitor at all, and yet copyright can stop the photocopying of a book in an afternoon, on the day the book is written, without any registration, fee or examination. A trade mark can stop a rival whose product is better made, cheaper and honestly labelled with a different maker’s name in small print, if the sign on the front is close enough to confuse buyers. A design registration can stop a product that works in a wholly different way, provided it looks the same to the eye. A geographical indication can stop a trader in a distant State from calling his goods by a regional name they do not come from, and no single trader can own that right at all.

The comparison that matters is therefore not a ranking. It is a matching exercise between the harm a person fears and the right whose infringement test is built to catch that harm. This article makes that match across the five rights governed by the Patents Act 1970, the Copyright Act 1957, the Trade Marks Act 1999, the Designs Act 2000 and the Geographical Indications of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999. It compares them on the nine dimensions that decide real choices: what each protects, the threshold a creation must clear, whether registration is needed before a suit, the term, who may own the right, the infringement test, the principal defences, the remedies, and the treatment of a defendant who created independently. It then works through the overlaps where the rights meet on a single product, because the overlaps, and not the tidy definitions, are where practical decisions are made. Each of the five owning articles in this series treats one statute in full; this article takes none of their questions, and its job is the comparison itself and the verdicts the comparison supports.

The decision rule: choose by the conduct you want to stop

The five rights divide, at bottom, by the act each one forbids. A patent forbids making, using, offering for sale, selling or importing the claimed invention, by anyone, for any reason other than the statutory exceptions, and it forbids those acts even when the person doing them arrived at the invention alone. Copyright forbids copying: the reproduction of the work, or of a substantial part of it, and the other acts in the owner’s bundle, and it forbids them only against a person who took the work from the owner, directly or through a chain of copies. A trade mark forbids the use of an identical or deceptively similar sign in the course of trade where confusion is likely, and it does so because the sign points buyers to a source, so the wrong is done to the buying public as much as to the owner. A registered design forbids the application of the design, or of a fraudulent or obvious imitation of it, to an article in the registered class, judged by the eye alone. A geographical indication forbids the use of a regional name in a way that misleads the public about where goods come from, or that amounts to unfair competition against the producers of the named place.

Once the rights are stated as prohibitions, the choice among them stops being mysterious. The applicant who fears that a competitor will build a machine that does the same job by the same means, possibly without ever seeing the original, needs the right that forbids the making itself, and only a patent does that. The applicant who fears that the text, the drawings, the recording or the code will be lifted and reused needs the right that forbids copying, and copyright does that from the moment of creation. The applicant who fears that buyers will be diverted by a lookalike name or get-up needs the right that polices signs in the market, and that is the trade mark, backed by passing off. The applicant who fears that a rival product will borrow the appearance that sells the original needs the design registration. The producers who fear that a famous regional name will be used on goods from elsewhere need the geographical indication, which none of them can hold alone and all of them hold together.

What is the one question that decides which right to use?

The deciding question is: what exactly would the rival have to do for the harm to happen? If the harm requires copying, copyright or design law answers. If it happens through a confusing sign, trade mark law answers. If it happens even when the rival invents alone, only a patent answers. Name the feared act, and the choice settles itself.

That discipline also explains why so many comparisons found elsewhere mislead. A table that lists subject matter, term and fee side by side invites the reader to shop for a right the way one shops for a phone plan, as though the rights were substitutes of different prices. They are not substitutes. They are five different locks for five different doors, and a product may stand behind several doors at once, which is why the overlap sections of this article carry more practical weight than the definitions. The reader who finishes the comparison should be able to take a concrete object, a logo, a machine, a bottle shape, a song, a software product, a bag of tea carrying a regional name, and say which right answers which feared act, which office grants it, what it costs under the official fee schedule, how long it lasts, and what the owner would have to prove in court. That is the standard this article sets itself.

What each right actually protects

The first dimension is subject matter, and it is the dimension on which the five rights differ most deeply, because each protects a different aspect of the same physical world. A patent protects an invention: a new product or process involving an inventive step and capable of industrial application, and what the owner actually holds is the set of claims in the specification, read as a skilled reader would read them. The protection is of the claimed technical solution however it is dressed. A rival who builds the same solution in uglier housing, with different materials where the claims allow, and under a different name, infringes, because the claims and not the appearance define the monopoly. Copyright protects a work: an original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, a cinematograph film, or a sound recording, and what it protects is the particular expression, the words chosen, the lines drawn, the notes arranged, and not the idea, the facts or the method the expression describes. A trade mark protects a sign: a name, a logo, a label, a shape, a combination of colours, anything capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one undertaking from those of another, and what is protected is neither the sign in the abstract nor the goods, but the association between the sign and a trade source in the minds of buyers. A registered design protects features of shape, configuration, pattern, ornament or composition of lines or colours applied to an article, insofar as those features appeal to and are judged solely by the eye, and it expressly does not protect any mode or principle of construction or anything that is in substance a mere mechanical device. A geographical indication protects a name or sign identifying goods as originating in a territory, region or locality where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic is essentially attributable to that origin, and what is protected is the truthful use of the name by the producers of that place.

The idea and expression distinction is the load-bearing wall on the copyright side, and the Supreme Court drew it in R.G. Anand v Delux Films in 1978, in a dispute about a film said to copy a play: there can be no copyright in an idea, a subject matter, a theme, a plot, or in historical or legendary facts, and the protection runs to the form, the manner and the arrangement in which the author works the idea out. Two authors may take the same plot skeleton and produce two works, and neither infringes the other, provided each expression is his own. The patent side of the wall is nearly the opposite: a patent claim is drafted at the level of the technical idea itself, generalised beyond the inventor’s own embodiment, and that is exactly why the patent monopoly is the broadest of the five and why it is fenced by the strictest examination and the shortest term. Between them sits the trade mark, which protects neither an idea nor an expression but a pointer: the public’s learned connection between a sign and a source. That is why a trade mark can be infringed by a defendant whose goods are excellent and whose copying is nil, if the pointer is blurred, and why a slavish copy of an unregistered sign on goods nobody confuses may escape trade mark liability while still raising a copyright question in the artwork.

Originality, the copyright threshold, is deliberately low, and it is a different thing from the novelty the patent system demands. In Eastern Book Company v D.B. Modak, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court rejected both the sweat of the brow doctrine, under which labour and capital alone would earn protection, and any test demanding novelty or inventive height, and set the threshold at the exercise of skill and judgment with a modicum of creativity. A work can therefore be unoriginal in the patent sense, a rearrangement of what everyone knows, and still be original in the copyright sense, provided the arrangement is the author’s own. The design threshold is different again: a design must be new or original and not previously published in India or elsewhere, but the enquiry is confined to appearance, so a design may sit on a wholly familiar mechanism and still register if its look is new. The trade mark threshold is distinctiveness: the sign must be capable of distinguishing, either because it is inherently distinctive or because use has taught the public to treat it as a badge of origin, and a sign that merely describes the goods, or has become the common name of the goods, fails at the gate. The geographical indication threshold is the link between place and quality: the applicant must show that the goods’ quality, reputation or characteristic belongs essentially to the place, which is a collective and evidentiary showing unlike any individual creation test.

Can an idea by itself be protected in India?

No right in this comparison protects an idea as such. Copyright, on the R.G. Anand v Delux Films principle, protects an idea’s expression and never the idea, theme or facts. A patent comes closest, protecting only an idea worked into a claimed invention meeting the patentability tests. An idea outside both is protected, if at all, by confidence while secret.

That last sentence deserves emphasis, because the wish to protect an idea is the most common starting point of enquiries in this field, and every honest comparison has to disappoint it before it can help. A business method described at the level of concept, a plot described in one paragraph, a recipe described as a list of ingredients, a product described by the job it does: none of these is, without more, the subject of any of the five rights. What the law protects is always one step more concrete: the worked-out expression, the claimed and enabled invention, the sign in use, the applied appearance, the name tied to a place. The practical consequence is that timing and form decide protection. The same concept can end up strongly protected, weakly protected or unprotected depending on whether its owner wrote it down in protectable expression, filed for the right that matches its mechanism, registered the sign before the market filled with imitators, or kept it secret under contract. The comparison that follows is best read as a set of instructions for taking that one concrete step correctly for each kind of asset.

The thresholds compared: what a creation must prove before any right exists

Each system sets a gate, and the gates differ as much in kind as in height, which is why asking which threshold is highest is only the beginning of the comparison. The patent gate is the only one that measures the creation against the whole of human knowledge. Novelty is absolute: a single prior publication or public use anywhere, including the inventor’s own disclosure before filing, defeats it. Inventive step then asks whether the invention would have been obvious to a person skilled in the art with that prior art in hand, and industrial application asks whether the thing can be made or used in an industry. The gate is examined before grant by a public office searching the record, and it can be re-examined at any later challenge, so a patent carries its threshold with it through its whole life: the right that demanded the most at entry can be destroyed at trial by a document nobody found at examination.

The copyright gate is the only one that is never examined at all. Originality, on the Modak standard of skill and judgment with a modicum of creativity, is presumed in practice and tested only when a dispute forces the question, and there is no register of earlier works against which a new work is searched, because the system does not promise that the work is the only one of its kind; it promises only that the work is the author’s own and was not copied. The trade mark gate is relational rather than historical: distinctiveness is judged against the goods and against the market’s habits, and it can be earned, because a descriptive sign that acquires a secondary meaning through use may cross the gate it failed at birth, while a sign born distinctive can fall back through it by becoming the common name of the goods. The design gate is narrow and visual: the appearance must be new or original and not previously published in India or elsewhere, and the enquiry ignores merit, function and ingenuity entirely, which is why a design can be refused or cancelled over a trade catalogue photograph and why no amount of engineering brilliance strengthens it. The geographical indication gate is evidentiary and collective: the applicant association must demonstrate, with the goods’ specification and the region’s record, that a quality, reputation or characteristic is essentially attributable to the origin, and the gate is guarded in part by the inspection structures the registration itself sets up.

The consequence of the five gates, for the comparison, is that the rights fail in different ways and at different moments. A patent can fail before it exists, at examination, and the applicant learns of the failure from the office. A trade mark can fail at the point of building value, years after registration, by sliding into generic use. A design fails silently in the market: a launch photograph published before the application destroys the novelty the registration was meant to record. Copyright almost never fails at the gate at all, because the gate is low and unexamined; its failures happen later, at the proof of copying. A geographical indication fails as a project, when the producers cannot assemble the evidence or the association to hold it. An applicant comparing the five systems is therefore not choosing among five heights of one wall. The applicant is choosing among five different moments of risk: the office, the register, the launch, the trial, and the long discipline of keeping a sign distinctive in trade.

Nine dimensions, five rights, one decision rule

The table below states the comparison in the form the cluster’s owning articles support, dimension by dimension, and its final column records, for each dimension, which right that dimension favours for a stated objective. The table is a map, not an argument; the sections after it supply the reasoning, the qualifications and the cases where the dimensions pull against each other.

Dimension	Patent	Copyright	Trade mark	Design	Geographical indication	Which right this dimension favours
Subject matter	An invention: a new product or process with an inventive step, capable of industrial application	A work: literary, dramatic, musical or artistic works, films and sound recordings	A sign: a name, logo, label, shape or colour combination distinguishing one trader’s goods or services	Features of shape, configuration, pattern or ornament applied to an article, judged by the eye	A name identifying goods from a place whose quality or reputation is attributable to that origin	Depends on the asset: the dimension favours whichever right matches what the asset is
What is actually protected	The claimed technical solution, however it is expressed or housed	The particular expression, never the idea, facts or method behind it	The association between the sign and one trade source in buyers’ minds	The visual appearance, never the function or the way the article works	The truthful use of a regional name by that region’s producers	Patent, for breadth over function; copyright, for exact expression
Threshold the creation must clear	Novelty, inventive step and industrial application, tested by examination	Originality: the author’s own skill and judgment with a modicum of creativity	Distinctiveness, inherent or acquired through use	New or original appearance, not previously published	A demonstrated link between the place and the goods’ quality, reputation or characteristic	Copyright, for the lowest threshold; patent, for the most demanding
Registration before an infringement suit	Required: no patent, no infringement action	Not required: the right arises on creation, registration is evidence only	Required for an infringement action; not required for passing off	Required: an unregistered design has no statutory protection	Required: only a registered proprietor and authorised users can sue	Copyright, which needs no registration at all
Term	Twenty years from the filing date	The author’s life and sixty years after; sixty years from publication for films, recordings, photographs and works of organisations	Ten years, renewable indefinitely in further periods of ten years	Ten years, extendable once by five years, a maximum of fifteen	Ten years, renewable indefinitely in further periods of ten years	Trade mark and geographical indication, which need never expire
Who may own the right	The inventor, an assignee or an employer under the Act’s rules; an individual or a company	The author or first owner under the Act, an employer or a commissioning party in the cases the Act specifies; an individual or a company	Any proprietor trading or proposing to trade under the sign; an individual or a company	The proprietor of the design, the creator or a commissioning party or employer; an individual or a company	A collective only: an association of producers or a statutory body holds it for the region’s producers	The first four rights, for individual ownership; the geographical indication, for a producing community
Infringement test	Whether the accused product or process falls within the claims	Whether a substantial part of the work was copied	Whether confusion is likely; for a mark with reputation, whether unfair advantage is taken or detriment caused	Whether the article bears a fraudulent or obvious imitation, judged by the eye	Whether the use misleads the public as to the goods’ geographical origin	Trade mark, which can bite without any copying; patent, which binds even independent inventors
Principal defences	Invalidity of the patent, non-infringement, the research and regulatory use exceptions	Independent creation, no substantial part taken, fair dealing and the other permitted acts	Prior use, honest concurrent use, descriptive use, no likelihood of confusion	The grounds of cancellation, raised as a defence; no imitation to the eye	Prior good faith trade mark rights, honest use of a person’s own name or a predecessor’s name	Copyright, where independent creation is a complete answer
Remedies	Injunction, and damages or an account of profits	Injunction, damages or an account of profits, delivery up, and criminal liability for knowing infringement	Injunction, damages or an account of profits, and delivery up of infringing labels and marks	Compensation measured by the Act: a sum per contravention subject to a contract ceiling and an overall cap per design	Injunction, damages or an account of profits, and delivery up	Patent and copyright, for the widest remedial spread
Treatment of the independent creator	Bound in full: independent invention is no defence	Not liable: copying must be proved	Liable if the sign confuses, whether or not anything was copied	Not liable unless the design was imitated; independent design is a defence in substance	Liable if the use misleads as to origin, whatever the user’s intention	Patent, for the owner; every other right, for the defendant

Read down the final column and the pattern of this article appears. No right wins the table. The patent wins on breadth and on the treatment of independent creators, and loses on threshold, term and the need for registration and examination. Copyright wins on threshold, on arising without registration and on the completeness of the independent creation defence, and loses because it cannot reach function or an honest re-creation. The trade mark wins on term and on biting without copying, and protects the narrowest thing of all, a pointer to source. The design wins nothing outright except speed and cheapness of acquisition for appearance, and is the only right with a hard outer term that renewal cannot extend. The geographical indication wins on collective term and loses on individual ownership, which it refuses altogether.

The decision rule that the table supports is the one stated at the start, and it can be written as four sentences keyed to four harms. If the feared harm is the copying of the exact thing, the text, the recording, the drawing, the code, the answer is copyright, with design registration for the exact look of a manufactured article. If the feared harm is the use of a confusingly similar sign, the answer is a trade mark registration, with passing off behind it for the period before registration or where registration was neglected. If the feared harm is a competitor making a functionally equivalent product, by copying or by independent work, the answer is a patent, and there is no second answer. If the feared harm is the use of a regional name on goods that do not come from the region, the answer is a geographical indication held by the producers’ association, with authorised user registrations for the individual producers who trade under it. Every worked decision later in this article is one of these four sentences applied to facts, with cost, term and proof deciding the cases that fall between two sentences.

The dimensions also compound, and the compounds explain why experienced owners describe the rights in personalities rather than in lists. A short term joined to constitutive registration and a strict threshold produces the patent’s personality: a right that must be planned years ahead, bought at the price of publication, and spent deliberately because its clock runs from filing through examination to a fixed end. An endless term joined to a confusion test produces the trade mark’s personality: a right that grows with the business, that is strengthened by the very sales it protects, and whose enemies are not imitators alone but the owner’s own neglect, since unused and genericised marks die in the register while famous ones harden. Automatic subsistence joined to a copying test produces copyright’s personality: a right that costs nothing and proves expensively, whose owner’s real discipline is not filing but record keeping, the drafts, files and dated versions that turn a claim of copying into a demonstration. A short term joined to an eye test produces the design’s personality: a sprinter’s right for the launch years of an article, devastating against the slavish copy and useless against everything else. A collective owner joined to a truthfulness test produces the indication’s personality: a right no balance sheet can hold, maintained by an association’s continuing stewardship of a specification, protecting a name whose value was built by generations before the register existed. The comparisons of detail in the sections that follow are the evidence for these five personalities, and a reader who holds the personalities in mind will predict most of the detail before reading it: each right behaves, in examination, in litigation and in commerce, exactly as the compound of its dimensions says it should.

Registration: which rights exist before any office is approached

The second great divide in the comparison is between rights that registration creates and rights that registration merely records. Copyright stands on one side of that divide alone among the individually held rights. It subsists from the moment an original work is created, in the author, without application, fee, examination or grant, and it subsists whether or not the work is ever registered. Registration of copyright under the Copyright Act is a voluntary evidentiary step: the register is prima facie evidence of the particulars entered in it, which shortens a future dispute about authorship and date, and registration is the practical precondition for asking customs to intercept infringing copies at the border, but the right itself, and the ability to sue on it, do not wait on any certificate. The register, the term and the ownership provisions behind that position are set out in full in the guide to the Copyright Act 1957. This is why copyright is the only right in the comparison that a creator holds in full on the first day, and it is the deep reason the comparison cannot be reduced to a fee table: for copyright, the state’s machinery is optional, and for every other right in this article it is the source of the right itself.

The patent is the opposite pole. Nothing in the Patents Act protects an invention that has not been applied for, examined and granted, and the application itself must be built to survive two distinct ordeals: examination by the Patent Office against the prior art, and the possibility of opposition before and after grant, together with revocation later. The specification must describe the invention fully and particularly, and must end with claims defining what is claimed, because the claims are the right. The applicant also runs a disclosure risk that has no parallel in the other four systems: the application is published after eighteen months from filing or priority, so the teaching of the invention enters the public record even if the patent is never granted, and the secrecy of the invention is spent whether or not a monopoly is bought with it. The examination, opposition and revocation machinery behind that pole is set out in the guide to the Patents Act 1970. A design registration shares the constitutive character without the examination depth: the design is examined largely for formal and registrability matters, novelty being tested mainly when the registration is challenged, and an unregistered design simply has no statutory protection to enforce. The geographical indication is likewise created by registration, at the instance of an association of producers or a statutory authority, after examination of the asserted link between the place and the goods, and individual producers obtain their position as authorised users on a further registration. The specification, inspection body and authorised user regime behind that structure is set out in the guide to the Geographical Indications Act 1999.

The trade mark sits between the poles, and its split position is the most commonly misunderstood point in the whole comparison. A trade mark infringement action lies only for a registered mark: the registration is constitutive of the statutory right sued upon, and the registered proprietor holds exclusive rights under the Act that an unregistered user does not. But a trader who has used an unregistered sign in trade has never been remediless, because Section 27(2) of the Trade Marks Act 1999 preserves the common law action of passing off, under which a trader protects the goodwill in a name or get-up against a misrepresentation that is likely to damage it. The two actions differ in what must be proved. The infringement plaintiff proves registration and a confusingly similar sign used on covered goods; the passing off plaintiff must additionally prove goodwill, a misrepresentation calculated to injure that goodwill, and damage or its likelihood. Registration therefore buys a shorter and cheaper proof, not the existence of protection, and the practical verdict is the reverse of the patent position: a business may trade for years protected in substance, but it carries a heavier burden in every dispute until it registers. The full working of the register, of relative and absolute grounds, and of the renewal machinery belongs to the guide to the Trade Marks Act 1999; the comparison needs only the proposition that registration is necessary for the statutory action and unnecessary for real, if more expensive, protection.

Registration interacts with the comparison in one more way that decides real cases: the registers are public, and a right on a register does work before any dispute. A granted patent is a notice to every competitor that the claims must be designed around, and the specification is read by engineers precisely because it is public. A registered trade mark deters applicants for similar signs and is examined against when later signs are filed, so the register cleans the market continuously and cheaply. A registered design fixes the date and the exact appearance claimed, which converts an argument about what a product looked like, years earlier, into the production of a document. Copyright’s register does the least of this work, because subsistence does not depend on it and most works are never registered, which is why owners of valuable works register them anyway: the certificate is bought for the litigation and licensing years, not for the creation day. A comparison that treated registration as a uniform administrative step would miss all of this. In one system registration is the right; in another it is a shortcut in proof; in a third it is an optional insurance policy; and the price of each follows from which of those it is.

Terms: twenty years, a lifetime and sixty, ten years without end

The terms of the five rights look arbitrary until each is read against the bargain that produced it. The patent term is twenty years from the filing date, uniform across fields of technology, and it is the shortest effective term of any individually held right in the comparison, because the patent bargain is the hardest: the inventor discloses the invention to the public in exchange for a time-limited monopoly over function, and the disclosure is permanent while the monopoly is brief. The twenty years run from filing, not from grant, so years spent in examination are years off the term, and the right cannot be renewed, extended by use, or revived by continued importance. When it ends, the invention enters the public domain in full, and anyone may practise it. Copyright’s term is measured from the author rather than the filing: for a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, the author’s life and sixty years after the author’s death, and for cinematograph films, sound recordings, photographs and the works of governments and organisations, sixty years from publication. The length reflects a different bargain: copyright never monopolised function or fact, only expression, so a long term blocks little that the public needs to use, and it is calibrated to let the author and two generations of a family draw the reward. The trade mark term is ten years from the application date, renewable in successive periods of ten years without limit, because a mark that still distinguishes has not exhausted its social function; the public is still being guided by it, and expiry would create the very confusion the system exists to prevent. The price of the endless term is use and distinctiveness kept alive: a mark left unused for the statutory period becomes vulnerable to removal, and a mark that becomes the generic name of the goods loses its distinctiveness and its right. The design term is ten years from registration, extendable once by five years on application and fee, fifteen years at the outside, and then the appearance enters the public domain for anyone to copy, which matches the design system’s purpose of giving a product’s look a protected launch period rather than a permanent fence. The geographical indication is registered for ten years and renewable in further periods of ten without limit, like the trade mark, because the quality of a region’s goods does not expire either; the registration belongs to the place’s producers collectively, and its renewals are the association’s continuing stewardship.

Three practical consequences follow from the term dimension, and each is a verdict in miniature. The first is that a patent filing decision is a decision about a fixed and unrepeatable window: the inventor who delays filing spends term on the front end and gains nothing at the back, and the inventor who files before the invention is ready may find the twenty years consumed by development. The second is that the trade mark is the only individually held right that can be made permanent, so for a business asset that is expected to outlive products, the name, the mark is the long asset and everything else is a wasting one; product generations turn over under one enduring sign, and the comparison of terms is the reason brand owners register marks for products whose patents will expire within the products’ own commercial lives. The third is that the design term’s fifteen-year ceiling and the copyright term’s length create a trap at their boundary, which the overlap section examines: an appearance that is launched as a manufactured article gets the short design term or, through the Copyright Act’s Section 15 machinery, loses its copyright once the article is reproduced industrially more than fifty times, whichever route the owner neglected. Term, in this comparison, is never just a number in a table. It is the length of the fence each bargain was willing to build, and it dictates filing dates, product cycles and the order in which rights must be secured.

Renewal behaviour is the term dimension seen from the accounts department, and it divides the rights once more. The patent is kept alive by annuities that fall due from the third year and rise across the term, so the register of a mature patent portfolio is a record of annual decisions that the invention still earns its fence; patents lapse for unpaid annuities in large numbers, which is the system working as intended, returning unvalued claims to the public early. The mark is renewed once a decade at a modest fee, and its real maintenance cost is not the fee but the use and policing that keep it distinctive. The design asks for one decision, the extension at the tenth year, and then ends the conversation. Copyright asks for nothing, ever, which is why estates discover copyrights in probate that nobody administered for decades. The indication’s renewal is an association’s act of stewardship, charged to the producers as a class. An owner comparing terms should therefore compare not only lengths but the pattern of attention each right demands: the patent taxes attention annually, the mark taxes it continuously in the market, the design taxes it once, and copyright taxes it only when a dispute arrives.

The calendar: when each right must be claimed

Read the five systems by their deadlines and a further difference appears, because each right has a moment after which it cannot be had at all, and the moments are distributed very differently across the life of a product. The patent’s moment is the earliest and the least forgiving: the application must precede any disclosure of the invention by the inventor or by anyone, since novelty is judged against everything published or publicly used before the filing or priority date, and the inventor’s own exhibition, paper, pitch or sale can be the anticipating act. The grace the Act allows for specified exhibitions and learned society papers is narrow and conditional, and no prudent applicant treats it as room. The design’s moment is the launch: the application must precede publication of the design in India or elsewhere, and the manufacturer’s own catalogue, trade fair stand and website are publications, so the design filing belongs in the weeks before release and not in the quarter after the first imitation is noticed. The trade mark’s moment is the most forgiving: a sign may be registered before use, on a proposed to be used basis, or after years of trading, and delay costs priority against intervening applicants rather than the right itself, though an unused registration becomes removable after the statutory period of non-use, which disciplines applicants who file defensively and never trade. Copyright has no moment at all, because there is nothing to claim; the only calendar in copyright belongs to the infringer’s side, in the limitation period for suits, and to the owner who registers voluntarily for evidentiary reasons. The geographical indication’s moment is collective and slow: the association must exist, the specification must be settled and the inspection structure described before the application is filed, so the calendar is set by the producers’ organisation and not by any launch date.

The comparison consequence is a filing order, and it is one of the most practically valuable propositions in this article. Where an asset needs several rights, the rights must be claimed in the order of their deadlines and not in the order of their importance: the patent application first, before any disclosure, because its deadline is a cliff; the design application next, before launch, because its deadline is the publication the launch itself commits; the trade mark application alongside the launch work, because its cost of delay is a queue rather than a cliff; and the geographical indication on the association’s own timetable. Businesses that file in the order of perceived prestige, usually the mark first because the brand feels primary, discover the order of deadlines the hard way, when the patent examiner or the design cancellation petitioner produces the applicant’s own launch material as the destroying document. The five calendars also explain a pattern in disputes: design and patent defendants so often plead the owner’s own prior publication, and trade mark defendants so rarely can, because the statutes set the trap at different points in the product’s life.

Ownership, assignment and licensing: what a holder may sell, and what a holder may not

The rights also differ in whose hands they start in and in how freely they move, and for businesses that buy, sell and license assets, this dimension decides transactions the other dimensions do not reach. Copyright starts in the author, and Section 17 then moves the starting point in defined cases: a work made in the course of employment under a contract of service belongs first to the employer, and a photograph, painting, portrait, engraving or film made for valuable consideration at the instance of another person belongs first to that person, in each case absent an agreement to the contrary. The author also keeps something no transfer removes: the special rights under Section 57, the rights to claim authorship and to restrain distortion or mutilation prejudicial to honour or reputation, which survive assignment of the copyright itself. Assignments of copyright must be in writing, and the Act supplies protective defaults where the deed is silent, limits on the period and territory the assignment is read to cover being the best known. A patent starts in the inventor and moves by assignment or by the employment and contract rules that most technology businesses settle in advance; assignments and licences must be in writing, and the patent system adds a public control the other systems lack, the compulsory licence, available on application three years after grant where the reasonable requirements of the public are unmet, the invention is not available at a reasonably affordable price, or it is not worked in India. The trade mark is the most freely commercial of the five: it is assignable with or without the goodwill of the business, it is licensed constantly in franchising and merchandising practice, and its value in a sale is the goodwill it has gathered. A design is assignable and licensable property of the ordinary kind, moving with the product line it dresses.

The geographical indication breaks the pattern entirely, and the break is one of the strongest verdicts in this comparison. Section 24 of the Geographical Indications Act forbids the assignment, transmission, licensing, pledge, mortgage or any other agreement encumbering a registered indication, and an authorised user’s right is likewise personal and non-transferable. The prohibition is the collective ownership principle carried to its end: the name belongs to a place and its producers as a class, so it cannot be sold by the association to a single buyer, cannot be taken by a creditor, cannot be licensed to a producer outside the region, and cannot be moved in a corporate acquisition. A business whose brand strategy requires a name that can be sold, franchised or mortgaged must therefore build that value in a trade mark, which it can own, and treat the indication as a shared shelter it can use but never hold. Compare the endpoints of the dimension and the spread is complete: at one end a trade mark, which is nothing but transferable reputation; at the other an indication, which is reputation the law deliberately makes inalienable; and between them the patent, transferable but shadowed by the state’s compulsory licence, the design, transferable with its product line, and copyright, transferable except for the author’s personal rights, which no deed can buy.

Infringement tests, defences, and what a winner takes

Each right is ultimately defined by the question a court asks when infringement is alleged, and the five questions are so different that a claimant can win under one statute and lose under another on identical facts. The patent question is a question of claim coverage: does the defendant’s product or process fall within the scope of the claims, construed purposively through the eyes of the skilled reader? Copying is irrelevant to that question; so, mostly, is the defendant’s intention. The copyright question is a question of derivation and weight: did the defendant copy the work, and was what was taken a substantial part of it, substantiality being judged qualitatively, by the importance of what was taken to the work, and not only by quantity? Access to the work plus similarity is the usual route to proving copying, and the whole shape of the enquiry changes if the defendant can show an independent path to the same result. The trade mark question is a question of public perception: is the defendant’s sign identical with or deceptively similar to the mark, used on goods or services of the kind the statute specifies, in a way likely to deceive or cause confusion? For a mark with a reputation in India, the statute also reaches use that takes unfair advantage of, or is detrimental to, the mark’s distinctive character or repute, even on dissimilar goods. In Cadila Health Care Ltd v Cadila Pharmaceuticals Ltd, the Supreme Court listed the factors that structure the comparison of marks, the nature of the marks, the degree of resemblance in sound and look, the nature of the goods, the class of purchasers and their level of care, the mode of purchase, and surrounding circumstances, and held that the comparison must be stricter, not laxer, where the goods are medicinal, because confusion there can harm health and not only trade. The design question is a question for the eye: does the defendant’s article bear the registered design or a fraudulent or obvious imitation of it, judged by the eye alone on the article as a whole? A defendant who changed the mechanism completely and kept the look infringes; a defendant who kept the mechanism and changed the look does not. The geographical indication question is a question of truthful origin: does the defendant’s use of the indication mislead the public as to the geographical origin of the goods, or constitute an act of unfair competition? The defendant who truthfully labels goods with their real origin in a way that does not borrow the indication is outside the test; the defendant whose label invokes the protected place for goods made elsewhere is inside it.

The defences line up with the tests, and comparing them tells a claimant where an action is likely to break. A patent defendant may attack the root of the right, pleading the grounds of revocation as a defence and counterclaiming for revocation, may deny that the claims reach the accused product, and may rely on the statutory exceptions, including acts done for experiment or research and the use reasonably related to regulatory approval, which the Act declares not to be infringement. A copyright defendant may deny copying, deny substantiality, and plead the permitted acts, of which fair dealing for research, private study, criticism, review and the reporting of events is the workhorse; a copyright defendant may also simply prove that the resemblance came from a common source or from independent work, which is a complete answer and not a mere mitigation. A trade mark defendant may plead prior use in good faith, honest concurrent use, descriptive or nominative use of the sign in accordance with honest practices, acquiescence where the proprietor knowingly stood by, and, at the level of the test itself, the absence of any real likelihood of confusion. A design defendant’s principal route is the grounds on which the registration could be cancelled, which the Designs Act allows to be raised as a defence in the infringement suit itself: that the design was not new or original, that it was published before the registration, that it is not a design within the Act’s definition. A geographical indication defendant may rely on prior trade mark rights acquired in good faith, which the Act expressly protects, and on honest indications of a person’s own name or place of business. No two of these defensive maps coincide, which is why the choice of right at filing time is also a choice of the defences the owner will face decades later.

Remedies complete the test dimension, and here the rights separate again. A successful patent plaintiff is entitled to an injunction and, at the plaintiff’s election, damages or an account of profits, and the court may order the infringing goods seized or destroyed; the same pattern, injunction with damages or an account of profits and delivery up of infringing copies, runs through copyright under Section 55 and through trade mark law under Section 135, with copyright adding criminal liability, on complaint, for knowing infringement, which gives copyright a deterrent the other civil rights lack. Design law is the outlier, and the difference is a real verdict input: the Designs Act measures the infringer’s liability in fixed sums, a sum not exceeding Rs 25,000 recoverable as a contract debt for each contravention, capped at Rs 50,000 in respect of any one design, or a suit for compensation and an injunction, so the monetary ceiling of the design system is low and known in advance, and owners of valuable appearances litigate accordingly, often alongside copyright or passing off where those rights survive. Geographical indication plaintiffs obtain the injunction, damages or account and delivery up pattern of the trade mark system. Interim relief, the urgent injunction that decides most litigation in practice, is available across all five, and turns everywhere on the strength of the right shown, the balance of convenience and the irreparability of the harm, but the underlying right’s quality differs: a registered right carries a prima facie weight in court that an unregistered claim must earn by evidence, which is one more form of the registration divide described earlier.

Enforcement also runs outside the civil suit in two of the five systems, and the rights divide again on this line. Copyright carries a criminal code of its own: knowing infringement is an offence under Section 63, and the threat of a police complaint shapes settlement practice around pirated books, recordings and software in a way no purely civil right reproduces. Copyright also reaches the border directly, because Section 53 lets the owner give notice to the customs authorities that infringing copies are to be treated as prohibited goods, and registration is the practical key to that route. The Trade Marks Act likewise makes the falsifying of a mark and the false application of a mark to goods offences under Sections 103 and 104, and counterfeit goods are stopped at the border under the customs recordal framework for intellectual property rights. The Patents Act has no criminal chapter and no equivalent border lever: the patentee’s remedy is the civil suit alone, which is why patent enforcement is planned as litigation from the first day. The design system, again the lightest, offers neither a criminal offence for piracy nor a border regime of practical weight, and its owners enforce through the civil compensation route the Act measures, supplemented wherever the facts allow by the other rights in the stack. A comparison of remedies that counted only damages would miss this division entirely. Two of the rights can call on the police and the customs house; three cannot; and the choice of a right at filing decides which doors are open when the imitation arrives.

Independent creation: the difference that changes every calculation

Of all the dimensions, the treatment of independent creation separates these rights from one another most sharply in practical effect, and it is the dimension least understood outside the profession. A patent binds the independent inventor completely. If two laboratories solve the same problem in the same claimed way in the same season, the one that files first and obtains the patent may exclude the other from practising its own invention, and the second inventor’s honesty, expense and independence are no defence; the statutory reliefs for earlier secret use are narrow and are not a general prior user right on the scale some other systems know. This severity is deliberate. The patent system’s claim is that a monopoly over function is tolerable only because it is awarded once, on a public record, after examination, for a short term, and any general independent invention defence would dissolve the certainty the register is meant to create. Copyright takes the opposite position with equal deliberation. Infringement requires copying, and a work produced independently, however similar, does not infringe, because copyright never claimed to monopolise the territory of expression, only to forbid travelling to it by the owner’s road. The defendant who keeps dated drafts, source files and development records holds the materials of a complete defence, which is why sophisticated creators preserve their process and why copyright disputes so often become disputes about access and about the probative force of similarities too close for coincidence.

The design system belongs in substance to the copyright side of this divide. Piracy of a registered design requires that the design, or a fraudulent or obvious imitation, be applied to the defendant’s article, and the concepts of imitation built into Section 22 presuppose derivation from the registered design; a genuinely independent design that converges on a similar look raises the question of obvious imitation, but the defendant who designed independently and can show it is in a wholly different position from the patent defendant. The trade mark and geographical indication systems belong to neither side, because their tests are not about creation at all. A trader who devises, in perfect innocence, a sign identical to a registered mark and begins using it on the same goods is liable for infringement if confusion is likely, because the wrong is the confusion in the market and not the derivation of the sign; his innocence may affect costs and accounts but it does not defeat the injunction. The same is true of a producer outside a region who brands goods with the region’s protected name believing it to be a generic description: if the use misleads the public about origin, the indication is infringed, and belief is no answer. Two working practices follow from the divide, and both are invisible in a subject matter table. The first is reverse engineering. A competitor may buy a marketed product, take it apart, and learn how it works, and no right in this comparison forbids the learning: copyright is not infringed by studying a work or a product, trade mark law has nothing to say about inspection, and the design system protects the look of the maker’s own article and not the knowledge in it. What the competitor may not do, if a patent stands, is practise the claimed invention the inspection revealed; the patent system’s answer to reverse engineering is precisely that publication of the specification makes the teaching public while the claims make the practice forbidden, and the design-around, the engineering of a different route to the same function that steps outside the claims, is the lawful and intended response the system exists to provoke. The second practice is the clearance search. Because a patent binds the independent inventor and a trade mark binds the innocent adopter, the prudent business searches the patent record before committing to a mechanism and the trade marks register before committing to a name, and the search is not a courtesy to earlier owners but a protection against the two systems in which innocence is no defence. Copyright and design demand no clearance search of the same kind, because the independent creator is safe there, and the difference in professional practice between the fields is the independent creation divide expressed as a diary entry: search where innocence fails, document where derivation is the question.

The honest verdict of this dimension is therefore threefold. Where independent work must remain safe, because a field has many parallel workers and the asset is expressive, copyright and design are the congenial rights. Where a monopoly against the world is the commercial requirement, because a rival’s independent version would destroy the investment case, only the patent supplies it, at the patent price. And where the harm is confusion, the defendant’s innocence is simply beside the point, in trade mark and geographical indication law alike, which is why clearance searching before adopting a sign is a discipline those two systems impose on every trader whether the trader respects the systems or not.

The overlaps: where the choice is actually made

The five rights were each defined above on their own territory, but real products do not respect territories, and most valuable assets sit where two or three rights overlap. The overlaps are not accidents of drafting. Each overlap exists because a single human creation has several aspects: a logo is at once a drawing and a badge of origin; a product shape is at once an appearance and, if the market learns to read it as a badge, a sign; a software product is at once a text and a working machine; a package is at once a printable surface, a three-dimensional form and the face by which buyers find the goods. The statutes negotiate these overlaps with specific rules, and the comparison becomes practical exactly here, in the rules that say how far each right reaches onto a neighbour’s territory and which right yields when two are claimed over the same feature.

The logo is the elementary case, and the answer is that both rights apply, to different aspects of the same drawing. As an original artistic work, a logo is protected by copyright from the moment it is drawn, in its designer or in the party the first ownership rules vest it in, without registration. As a sign that distinguishes one trader’s goods, the same logo is registrable as a trade mark and protected against confusing use. The two protections answer different harms. Copyright answers the person who lifts the artwork itself, prints the identical device on a poster, embeds it in an app, and copyright does so whatever the goods involved, because the wrong is the copying of the work. The trade mark answers the trader who adopts a similar device for similar goods so that buyers take his goods for the owner’s, and it does so whether or not the artwork was copied line for line, because the wrong is the confusion. Neither answer makes the other redundant: the copyright owner who never traded under the logo may hold no goodwill and no mark, while the mark owner who commissioned the logo from an agency and took no assignment may find the copyright in the artwork belongs to the agency. The verdict for logos is therefore double: assign the copyright in writing when the logo is created, and register the mark for the goods of the business, because the first act without the second leaves the source-identifying harm unanswered, and the second without the first leaves ownership of the artwork itself in a stranger’s hands.

Product shape presents the hardest negotiation in the comparison, because the design system and the trade mark system claim the same three-dimensional form on opposite principles, and the statutes on both sides draw a boundary meant to keep the two monopolies from being stacked into a permanent one. The Designs Act’s definition of a design excludes a trade mark, so the registered design and the registered mark cannot be the same right over the same feature held under both Acts at once in the same respect. The Trade Marks Act answers from its side in Section 9(3), which refuses registration to a sign consisting exclusively of the shape of goods that results from the nature of the goods themselves, or of the shape necessary to obtain a technical result, or of the shape that gives substantial value to the goods. A functional shape, one the competitor needs in order to make a working product, is thus kept out of trade mark registration altogether, because an endless mark over a functional shape would extend the patent and design monopolies past their terms. A shape that does no technical work, that buyers have learned to treat as the badge of one maker, can in principle cross into trade mark territory once its distinctiveness is shown, and the fifteen-year design ceiling is the reason businesses attempt the crossing: the mark, renewed, can outlast the design term indefinitely. The boundary is policed strictly, because the social bargain is plain. Appearance gets a short statutory term, source identification gets an endless one, and a trader may not re-label a merely attractive or useful shape as a badge of origin to convert the short term into the endless one.

Can one product shape be both a registered design and a trade mark?

In the same respect, no. The Designs Act definition of a design excludes a trade mark, and Section 9(3) of the Trade Marks Act refuses functional shapes, shapes necessary to a technical result, and shapes giving substantial value. A shape may be registered as a design for its appearance and, once it genuinely identifies one maker, later as a mark.

Software shows the two systems dividing one asset by aspect without excluding each other. A computer programme is a literary work under the Copyright Act, so the code, as text, is protected by copyright against copying, and the protection arises without registration. The Patents Act approaches the same asset from the function side and draws its line in Section 3(k), which excludes a computer programme per se from patentability. In Ferid Allani v Union of India, the Delhi High Court held that the bar on programmes per se is not a bar on software inventions as a class: where the software produces a technical effect or makes a technical contribution, the invention is not to be refused merely because it is implemented in code. The practical division is therefore between the programme as written, which copyright guards, and the technical result the programme achieves, which a patent may guard where the statutory tests are met. A rival who writes fresh code to achieve the same unpatented result does not infringe the copyright, and a rival who copies the code infringes the copyright even if its product does something entirely different with it. Founders who treat software protection as a single question miss this split and routinely over-claim one side: copyright, which they hold, does not stop the reimplementation they fear, and the patent, which would stop it, was never applied for on the technical contribution that might have supported it.

Packaging and get-up gather three rights onto one object and are the everyday overlap most businesses actually fight about. The printed artwork and text on a package are artistic and literary works within copyright. The package’s shape and surface pattern, if new, are registrable as a design applied to the container as an article. The total get-up, the combination of name, colours, layout and shape by which buyers recognise the goods on a shelf, is protected by the trade mark system where elements are registered and by passing off for the get-up as a whole, since passing off has always reached misrepresentation through the overall appearance of goods and not only through names. The three rights again answer three harms: the copied artwork, the imitated container shape, and the shelf confusion of a lookalike product whose individual elements were each altered just enough to argue distinction while the whole still deceives. The verdict for packaging follows from that division. Register the design on a genuinely new container before launch, register the mark and the label, and treat passing off as the remedy of last resort rather than the plan, because it is the only one of the three that demands proof of goodwill and misrepresentation built from sales and market evidence in every single case.

The last overlap is the statutory trap between design and copyright, and it is the only overlap in this comparison where holding one right destroys the other. Section 15 of the Copyright Act provides that copyright does not subsist in a design registered under the Designs Act, and that where a design is capable of registration but is not registered, the copyright in it ceases as soon as an article to which the design has been applied has been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process. The policy is the same boundary keeping as in the shape question: a look destined for industrial multiplication belongs to the design system and its fifteen-year ceiling, and the life-plus-sixty copyright term is not available for it. The trap is that the fifty reproduction threshold is crossed by any successful product, usually before the owner has thought about design registration at all, and at that moment both rights are gone: the design was never registered, and the copyright has ceased by force of the section. The full mechanics of Section 15 belong to the guide to the Designs Act 2000, and the interface is flagged here because it changes the comparison’s verdict for every manufactured article with an original surface or shape: at launch, the design registration decision cannot be deferred, and an owner who relies on the automatic right alone is relying on a right the statute has already scheduled to expire at the moment of commercial success.

Layering: the case for holding several rights, and the case against over-claiming

Once the overlaps are understood, the layering question presents itself in its real form. It is not whether a product can carry several rights; the statute book settles that it can. The question is whether a business should deliberately build a stack, a patent on the mechanism, a design on the housing, copyright in the artwork and the code, marks on the name and the logo, or whether a stack is an expensive way to multiply weaknesses. The case for layering is the case from failure modes. Each right in the stack answers a harm the others miss, and each fails in a different way. A patent may be refused or revoked; the design registration still stands against the lookalike. A design term may run out; the mark, if the shape has crossed into distinctiveness, may still answer confusion. Copyright may fail for want of proof of copying; the patent, which needs no such proof, may still bind the defendant. A portfolio is therefore a redundancy structure across the whole enforcement problem, and in markets where imitation is fast and cheap, the stack raises the imitator’s cost of designing around every layer at once, which is often the whole commercial point: the imitator must change the mechanism, the appearance, the name and the artwork simultaneously, and at some point the imitation stops being a copy of the product that sells. There is also a transaction case. Separable rights are separately licensable and separately saleable assets, and a business with a clean stack can license the mark while assigning a patent, or sell a product line with its designs, in combinations a single right cannot support.

The case against over-claiming is equally concrete, and it is made from the costs of asserting rights a product cannot support. Every registered right is a claim made to the state and to the market, and each of the registration systems holds a correction mechanism: a patent may be revoked, a mark rectified off the register, a design cancelled, a geographical indication rectified, on the grounds the respective Acts specify, and those mechanisms are available to the very defendants the rights were meant to restrain. A weak right asserted in litigation invites the counterattack that removes it, with costs, and Indian courts may award costs against a party that has pressed an untenable claim, so the attempt to enforce the weakest layer can damage the credibility of the strongest one in the same suit. There is also a disclosure cost unique to the stack: the patent application publishes the invention, the design registration publishes the appearance, and a layered filing programme is a systematic publication of how a product works and looks, timed to the applicant’s own launches. And there is a maintenance reality: renewals, annuities, watches and licences of right have to be administered for every layer, for every year, and rights lapse through neglected annuities as surely as through judgments. The verdict this article defends is a discriminating one. Layer the rights that each answer a distinct and realistic harm to the same asset, and file them in the order the statutes force, design before the fifty-reproduction threshold is crossed, patent before disclosure, mark before the market fills. Refuse layers that duplicate a harm already answered or that rest on thresholds the creation cannot meet, because those layers are not assets; they are invitations to a rectification petition and to adverse costs, and their presence in a portfolio misleads the owner about the protection actually held.

One small practice belongs in this section because it decides whether layers survive to be used. Every right in a stack is only as good as the records kept before filing: dated development files for the invention, drafts and source files for works, design drawings before launch photographs leak them into publication, and records of first use for marks. Where unpublished work is the asset, the handling of the material before any filing is itself a protection discipline, of the same kind that leads journalists to keep source material sealed and documented while a story is being verified, a practice examined in the account of how journalists use VaultBook to protect their sources. The analogy is exact in one respect: in both fields, the value sits in material that has not yet been published, the loss happens by early or careless exposure, and the records kept in the unpublished period are what the later legal position is built from.

Cost and time: what the fee schedules say, and what they leave out

The official fees are the most quotable numbers in this comparison and the least representative of what protection costs, but they are worth stating precisely because they fix the order of magnitude of entry to each system, and every figure in this section is taken from the fee schedule of the relevant Rules. Under the First Schedule to the Patents Rules 2003, filing a patent application electronically costs Rs 1,600 for a natural person, a startup or a small entity and Rs 8,000 for a large entity, and a request for examination costs Rs 4,000 at the smaller scale and Rs 20,000 at the larger, with annuities thereafter to keep a granted patent in force. Under the First Schedule to the Trade Marks Rules 2017, an electronic application costs Rs 4,500 per class for an individual, a startup or a small enterprise and Rs 9,000 per class for other applicants, and renewal is charged per class at the rates the same schedule fixes. Under the Second Schedule to the Copyright Rules 2013, the fee for registering a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is Rs 500 per work, one reason copyright registration is bought so freely as evidence even though it creates nothing. Under the First Schedule to the Designs Rules 2001, an application to register a design costs Rs 1,000 for an individual, a startup or a small entity, and the extension of the term for the further five years is separately charged. Under the First Schedule to the Geographical Indications Rules 2002, the application fee for registering an indication is Rs 5,000, with separate fees for authorised user registration. On entry price alone, then, the ranking is stable: copyright is cheapest because the right itself is free and its optional registration costs Rs 500; designs and marks enter at the low thousands per asset or per class; a patent enters at a comparable filing fee but only begins its cost there, since examination, responses to objections, hearings and annuities follow, and the drafting of a specification that will survive is professional work of a different order from any form in the other four systems.

Time separates the systems more than fees do. Copyright is held in full on the day of creation, and its registration, when sought, follows a documentary process measured in months, including the statutory wait for objections. A design registration is a comparatively quick documentary grant. A trade mark follows a path of examination, advertisement in the journal, a four-month opposition window and registration, and where no opposition is filed the path is measured in months to a few years; where a rival opposes, the registration may be contested for much longer, and the mark’s owner trades meanwhile on the application and on passing off. A patent is the slow right by design: the application is published at eighteen months, examination proceeds on request, objections are answered in rounds, and grant, when it comes, follows years of process during which the applicant holds a pending application and no enforceable monopoly; the twenty-year term, running from filing, is being consumed throughout. A geographical indication moves at the pace of a collective: assembling the producers, proving the link between place and quality, and examination and advertisement make it a project of years, undertaken by an association rather than by a firm. The verdict on time is that the systems protect at different speeds because they examine different things. Where nothing is examined, the right is instant and its weakness is proof; where function is examined, the right is slow and its strength, once granted, is the greatest of the five.

Does the cheapest right to obtain cost the least to enforce?

No. Copyright costs nothing to obtain and Rs 500 to register, yet a contested copyright suit requires the owner to prove ownership, access and substantial copying, often through costly expert evidence. A registered mark is nearly as cheap to obtain and far cheaper to prove. Total cost is acquisition plus proof, and the two rankings do not match.

The comparison of cost also fails if it stops at the courtroom door, because each right imposes a different continuing cost of ownership. The patent demands annuities that rise over the term and a working and licensing administration. The mark demands use, watch services against later applications, renewal each decade, and periodic defence of its distinctiveness against generic use. The design demands only the extension fee and then expires. Copyright demands nothing to maintain and everything to prove. A rational buyer of protection therefore compares not five fees but five cost profiles across the life of the asset, and the fee schedules quoted above are the first line of those profiles and not the total of any of them.

Six situations, six verdicts

Comparisons earn their keep in application, and this section applies the nine dimensions to six concrete situations, naming in each the difference that decides. Each verdict is stated on the comparison’s own logic: the feared act first, the right whose test catches it second, and the dimension that eliminates the alternatives third. This comparison is general legal information, not advice on any particular product or dispute, and the situations are illustrations of method rather than predictions about any filing.

The first situation is a founder launching a mobile application with a distinctive name, an icon, a body of code and a data-processing method the founder believes is new. The feared acts are three: a rival reimplementing the method with fresh code, a rival copying the app’s content and screens, and a rival launching under a near-identical name. The deciding difference is the independent creation divide. Copyright, which the founder holds in the code and the content from creation, answers only the second fear, because the reimplementation that copies nothing is beyond its reach. The patent answers the first fear if, and only if, the method makes a technical contribution of the kind the Ferid Allani construction leaves open; the application has to be filed before the launch discloses the method, and the founder who launches first and files later has spent the novelty the patent needed. The mark answers the third fear and should be filed for the name and the icon in the relevant classes at the same time as the launch work begins. The verdict is a sequence, not a choice: file the patent before disclosure if the technical contribution is real, rely on copyright for the code and content and keep the development records that prove independent creation in reverse, and register the mark early, because the app’s name is the asset the market will still be using when the code has been rewritten twice.

The second situation is an industrial designer with a chair whose shape is strikingly new and a manufacturer ready to produce it in volume. The feared act is a rival factory selling a chair that looks the same and works the same, at a lower price. The deciding difference here is the Section 15 interface between copyright and design. The chair’s appearance, as an artistic work, carries a copyright that feels reassuring and is, for an industrially produced article, a wasting asset: once chairs bearing the design pass fifty reproductions by an industrial process, the copyright ceases if the design was registrable and never registered. The design registration, filed before or at launch, answers the feared act directly for ten years extendable to fifteen, judged by the eye, at an entry fee of Rs 1,000 at the individual scale. The patent answers nothing, because the chair’s shape does no new technical work. A shape mark is excluded territory for a shape that gives substantial value to the goods and cannot be the plan. The verdict is design registration at launch, without deferral, and the case is the clearest in this article of a right lost not in litigation but at a calendar: the owner who waits until the imitation appears has usually already crossed the threshold that extinguished the fallback right.

The third situation is a group of weavers in a region whose handloom cloth carries a reputation buyers pay for, facing machine-made imitations sold under the region’s name from factories elsewhere. The feared act is the use of the regional name on goods that lack the origin, and the deciding difference is who may own the right. No individual weaver, and no single firm, can register the name as an ordinary trade mark and exclude the region’s other genuine producers, and an attempt to do so misconceives the asset, which is the place’s reputation and not any one trader’s goodwill. The geographical indication is built for exactly this asset: an association of producers holds the registration, individual producers register as authorised users, the term renews without end, and the infringement test is the misleading use of the name as to origin. The weavers may alongside it register a collective mark or a certification mark through their association for their own channel of trade, and the comparison between those routes is a matter of the association’s structure; the verdict is that the regional name itself belongs to the geographical indication route, and the deciding factor is the collective ownership the right demands and the other four rights refuse.

The fourth situation is an author with a completed manuscript and an offer from a publisher, worried about two different futures: the publisher’s terms, and a stranger lifting the book’s plot for a screenplay. The feared acts are copying of the text and borrowing of the idea, and the deciding difference is the idea and expression line drawn in R.G. Anand. Copyright answers the first fear in full and the second fear not at all: the stranger who takes the plot skeleton and writes an independent screenplay around it infringes nothing, while the stranger who lifts chapters, dialogue or the particular arrangement of scenes infringes even after changing the names. No other right in this comparison is available for the manuscript at all; there is no invention, no sign, no article and no place. The verdict is copyright alone, held from creation, with registration at Rs 500 per work worth buying as evidence before the work circulates widely, and with the author’s energy better spent on the publishing contract than on any search for a second right, because the protection the statute gives is complete against copying and empty against ideas, and no filing changes either half of that sentence.

The fifth situation is a manufacturer who has developed a machine that performs an industrial process faster than any machine on the market, and whose buyers will be able to inspect the machine once it is sold. The feared act is a competitor building the same machine after examining one unit, or reaching the same mechanism independently. The deciding difference is that this is the one fear among the five situations that only a patent answers, because the harm is functional equivalence itself, and copyright in the drawings, design registration in the housing and the maker’s mark on the plate each leave the mechanism free to copy. The patent application must precede the first sale and the first disclosure, the claims must be drafted to the mechanism and not to the embodiment the maker happens to sell, and the maker takes the twenty-year term, the eighteen-month publication and the examination years as the price of the only monopoly that reaches the harm. The verdict is a patent or nothing: if the mechanism cannot meet the patentability thresholds, the maker’s protection reduces to lead time, contract and secrecy for whatever of the know-how a buyer cannot see, and the honest comparison says so rather than dressing the lesser rights as substitutes.

The sixth situation is a professional photographer building a studio practice, whose assets are a portfolio of images, a studio name and a book of clients who commission shoots. The feared acts are the reuse of images without payment and a rival studio trading on a similar name. The deciding difference is the term and ownership architecture of copyright in photographs. A photograph is protected for sixty years from publication, not for the photographer’s life plus sixty, a flat term that treats the image as a commercial work; and where a photograph is taken for valuable consideration at a client’s instance, Section 17 makes the client the first owner absent an agreement to the contrary, so the unwary photographer does not even hold the right the comparison assigns. The verdict is contractual before it is statutory: the photographer’s engagement terms should reserve or license the copyright expressly, delivery files should carry the licence’s limits, and registration of signature images at Rs 500 per work is cheap evidence for an asset that travels by email and screenshot. The studio name belongs to the trade mark system and is filed once, renewably, in the ordinary way. No patent, design or indication is available or needed, and the situation shows the comparison working in reverse: it is as valuable to be told that a portfolio stands on one right, and on contract, as to be given a stack.

Which right should a founder secure first?

The mark, in the usual case; the patent, where timing is unforgiving. Names gather goodwill from the first sale, registration costs Rs 4,500 per class at the startup scale, and delay lets confusing signs crowd the register. Copyright needs no securing. The exception is an undisclosed invention: there the patent application goes first, because disclosure before filing can destroy novelty.

The offices, the courts, and where the comparison is administered

The five rights are administered by a single umbrella organisation with specialised registries, and the administrative map explains several features of the comparison. Patents, designs and trade marks sit under the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks: the Patent Office works through its offices at Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, the Designs Office is at Kolkata, and the Trade Marks Registry works from Mumbai with offices at Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Ahmedabad. Copyright is administered by the Copyright Office at New Delhi, and geographical indications by the Geographical Indications Registry at Chennai. The administration matters to the comparison in two ways. The first is that the examining cultures differ as much as the tests do: the Patent Office examines substance against the prior art, the Trade Marks Registry examines distinctiveness and earlier marks, the Designs Office and the Copyright Office work largely on the documents, and the pace and cost of each system follow from what its office is asked to judge. The second is that the registers interlock in practice: a trade mark examiner searches earlier marks, a design application is read against the exclusion of trade marks in its own definition, and an applicant who plans a stack across systems plans it against one connected administrative landscape, not five unrelated counters.

Enforcement sits in the courts, and the forum dimension has changed within the period this series covers in a way that touches all five rights at once. Disputes under these Acts are civil suits in the district courts and the High Courts exercising original jurisdiction, with the Commercial Courts framework governing the larger commercial disputes, and the Intellectual Property Division created in the Delhi High Court after the abolition of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board by the Tribunals Reforms Act 2021 is the clearest sign of the system’s direction: specialised benches hearing revocation, rectification and appeals that once went to a tribunal. For the comparison, the lesson of the forum is that the five rights converge in litigation even though they diverge everywhere else. The same interim injunction principles, the same evidence disciplines and increasingly the same specialised benches receive all five claims, which is why layered portfolios are pleaded together in one suit and why the quality of the weakest layer matters in court even where the layers were filed for different harms. The guide to intellectual property law in India treats the administration of the whole system, and this pillar comparison needs only the point that a choice among rights is also, in the end, a choice about what a specialised court will be asked to examine: claims, copies, confusion, appearances or origins.

Territory: five Indian rights, and the border of each

One dimension the five rights share in form and divide in detail is territory. Each of the five is an Indian right: it is granted under an Indian statute, it restrains acts in India, and it stops at the border, so that a business trading in several countries holds not one right but a family of parallel national rights, acquired country by country. The shared form hides different border mechanics. A patent’s Section 48 rights include importing the patented product into India, so the Indian patent reaches the foreign manufacturer at the Indian port even though it cannot touch the foreign factory. Copyright, by contrast, protects qualifying foreign works in India through the international copyright order framework, because the work-based system was built for creations that cross borders in a suitcase; the owner’s problem is usually proof, not subsistence. A trade mark registration is Indian, and a famous foreign mark without Indian registration must rely on the well-known mark provisions and passing off built on trans-border reputation, a heavier proof than any registration. A design registration is Indian and reads on articles sold or applied in India. A geographical indication is the most territorial of all in substance: it registers the link between an Indian register entry and a place, and the Darjeeling-type problem, a regional name used abroad on goods sold abroad, is answered by foreign registrations and certification marks in those markets, not by the Indian registration itself.

The filing consequence is the priority system, and it too divides the rights. Under the Paris Convention framework these Acts implement, an applicant who files first in one member country may claim that filing date in India within twelve months for patents and within six months for trade marks and designs, which turns the filing calendar of the previous section into an international one for those three rights. Copyright needs no priority claim, because subsistence does not depend on filing anywhere. The geographical indication stands largely outside the priority machinery, since its registration turns on the place and its producers rather than on a race between applicants. The verdict of the territory dimension is therefore a warning against the natural assumption that an Indian grant settles a product’s position: it settles the Indian position only, the import point is the patent’s real frontier, the mark’s reputation may travel further than its registration, and the indication’s name is weakest exactly where distance makes its misuse hardest to see.

What the patent copyright trademark comparison settles, and what it leaves open

The settled propositions of this article can be carried away in short form. The five rights are distinguished by the conduct each forbids, and the correct first question is always about the feared act, not about the prestige of the right. Copyright alone arises without the state. The patent alone binds the independent creator, and pays for that reach with examination, publication and the shortest term. The trade mark and the geographical indication alone can be perpetual, and they protect the narrowest subject matter, a pointer to a source and a truthful regional name. The design is the sprinter of the system, quick and cheap, with a hard ceiling of fifteen years. Layering works when each layer answers a distinct harm and fails, expensively, when layers are claimed over thresholds the creation cannot clear. The overlaps are governed by stated rules: Section 15 between copyright and industrial design, Section 9(3) between shape marks and function, Section 3(k) and the technical effect line between code and invention, and collective ownership between the regional name and every individual right.

What the comparison leaves open is the territory each pillar article owns: the examination practice of the Patent Office, the register and relative grounds of the Trade Marks Act, the term and licence architecture of the Copyright Act, the cancellation procedure of the Designs Act, and the specification and inspection regime of the Geographical Indications Act. A reader deciding about a real asset should move from this comparison to the pillar that owns the right the comparison selects, and to the field guide for the map of the system as a whole. The comparison’s own work is finished when the reader can say, of any creation, which harm matters, which right answers it, what that right costs to hold and to prove, and what will be left when its term runs out. That is the whole of the choice, and it is enough to choose well.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between a patent, copyright and a trade mark?

A patent protects an invention, a new product or process involving an inventive step and capable of industrial application, and forbids anyone from making, using or selling the claimed solution for twenty years, even a person who invented it independently. Copyright protects a work, an original literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, a film or a recording, and forbids copying of the expression, never the idea, for the author’s life plus sixty years. A trade mark protects a sign that distinguishes one trader’s goods or services, and forbids the use of a confusingly similar sign, renewably in ten-year periods without end. The three differ in what is protected, invention, expression, or source association, in whether registration is constitutive, and in the infringement test: claim coverage, copying of a substantial part, or likelihood of confusion.

Q: Which intellectual property right should protect a given creation?

The answer follows the harm feared rather than the kind of creation. Where the fear is that a rival will make something that works the same way, even by independent invention, only a patent answers. Where the fear is that the text, drawing, recording or code will be copied, copyright answers. Where the fear is that buyers will be diverted by a similar name or get-up, a trade mark or passing off answers. Where the fear is that the product’s look will be imitated, a design registration answers. Where the fear is that a regional name will be used on goods from elsewhere, a geographical indication answers. A single asset, a software product or a branded bottle, can face several of these fears at once, which is when a layered set of rights is considered.

Q: Which rights arise automatically and which need registration?

Copyright alone among the individually held rights arises automatically: it subsists in an original work from creation, in the author, without application, fee or grant, and a suit can be filed without any registration, although a registration certificate is valuable evidence. The other four rights are created by registration. A patent exists only after grant, a design only after registration, and a geographical indication only after the indication is registered and the producers register as authorised users. The trade mark is the mixed case: the statutory infringement action needs a registered mark, but an unregistered trader is not remediless, because passing off protects goodwill built through use. Each of the trade mark and design pillar articles in this series treats the registration machinery of its own Act.

Q: How do the terms of the different intellectual property rights compare?

A patent lasts twenty years from the filing date and cannot be renewed, extended or revived; the monopoly is short because it covers function itself. Copyright lasts the author’s life plus sixty years for most works, and sixty years from publication for films, sound recordings, photographs and government works; the term is long because it covers only expression. A trade mark is registered for ten years and renewable indefinitely, because a mark that still guides buyers has not exhausted its purpose. A design lasts ten years extendable once by five, fifteen at most. A geographical indication is registered for ten years and renewable indefinitely, like a trade mark. The two renewable rights are collective or reputational; the wasting rights protect what the law treats as a time-limited disclosure bargain.

Q: How do the infringement tests differ?

The patent test is claim coverage: does the accused product or process fall within the claims, read as a skilled reader reads them? Copying and intention are irrelevant. The copyright test is derivation and weight: did the defendant copy the work, and was what was taken a substantial part, judged qualitatively? Independent creation is a complete defence. The trade mark test is likelihood of confusion: is the defendant’s sign identical or deceptively similar, used so that buyers are likely to be deceived? For a mark with reputation, use that takes unfair advantage also counts. The design test is for the eye alone: is the defendant’s article a fraudulent or obvious imitation of the registered design? The geographical indication test is truthful origin: does the use mislead the public about where the goods come from? Five tests, five different wrongs.

Q: Can one product carry several intellectual property rights at once?

Yes, and the overlap is the rule rather than the exception for valuable products. A branded consumer product can carry a patent on its mechanism, a design on its housing, copyright in its packaging artwork and software, a registered mark on its name and logo, and a geographical indication on a regional ingredient’s name. The statutes negotiate the boundaries: a design excludes a trade mark over the same feature, functional shapes are refused mark registration under Section 9(3), and copyright in an industrially multiplied design ceases under Section 15 unless the design is registered. Layering is rational where each right answers a distinct feared act, and over-claiming is dangerous, because every weak layer invites a revocation or rectification counterattack with costs.

Q: Which intellectual property right is cheapest and fastest to obtain?

Copyright is free, since it arises on creation, and its optional registration costs Rs 500 per work under the Second Schedule to the Copyright Rules 2013. A design application costs Rs 1,000 at the individual, startup or small entity scale under the First Schedule to the Designs Rules 2001, and is a comparatively quick documentary grant. A trade mark application costs Rs 4,500 per class at the startup scale under the First Schedule to the Trade Marks Rules 2017, with examination, a four-month opposition window and registration. A patent is the slow and expensive right by design: filing costs Rs 1,600 at the small scale plus Rs 4,000 for examination, with publication at eighteen months and grant after years of prosecution. A geographical indication costs Rs 5,000 to apply but moves at the pace of a collective assembling its case.

Q: Which intellectual property right is hardest to enforce?

The patent is usually the hardest: the owner must prove the claims cover the accused product, and the defendant can counterclaim for revocation, putting the validity of the whole right on trial. A copyright suit is easier in proof but demands that copying be shown, access plus similarity being the usual route, and an independently created defence defeats it entirely. A registered trade mark on a confusion case is the most straightforward of the three, with registration proving the right and confusion the only question. A design suit is simple on the eye test but capped at modest compensation. A geographical indication suit is enforcement by a collective, which concentrates the cost but also the management. Hardest to obtain is the patent; hardest to prove to a court is often the design at its monetary ceiling.

Q: Which right protects a logo, copyright or a trade mark?

Both, and they protect different aspects of the same drawing. As an original artistic work, a logo is protected by copyright from the moment it is drawn, and the protection runs against whoever copies the artwork, whatever the goods. As a sign used in trade, the logo is registrable as a trade mark, and the protection runs against whoever uses a confusingly similar sign on related goods, whether or not the artwork was copied. The two are not substitutes. The copyright owner who never trades under the logo may hold no goodwill, and the trader who commissioned the logo but took no assignment may find the copyright belongs to the agency that drew it. The sound practice is double: take a written assignment of the copyright when the logo is created, and register the mark for the goods of the business.

Q: Can a patent stop a competitor who reached the same invention independently?

Yes, and that is the patent’s defining severity. If two laboratories reach the same invention in the same season, the one that files first and obtains the patent may exclude the other from practising its own invention, and the second inventor’s honesty, expense and independence are no defence. This is why the patent bargain is so strict: a monopoly against the world is awarded once, on a public register, after examination, for a short term. No other right in this comparison works this way. Copyright demands proof of copying, the design system presupposes imitation, and the trade mark and geographical indication systems ask about confusion and misleading origin, not about how the defendant arrived at the sign or name. Where independent invention is likely because a field is crowded, the patent is the only fence that holds.

Q: If a rival copies how a product works but changes how it looks, which right applies?

The patent, and it applies even if the rival’s housing, materials and branding are entirely different. A patent protects the claimed technical solution, and its claims are read purposively: the question is whether the rival’s machine performs the claimed invention, not whether it resembles the inventor’s product. Neither a design registration nor a trade mark touches this defendant, because the design guards appearance and the mark guards source association, and both of those have been deliberately changed. Copyright in the drawings may reach a rival who worked from the inventor’s drawings, but it cannot reach the reimplementation the drawings describe, because copyright protects expression and never the method. This is the case that makes the patent’s twenty-year term and its examination worth paying for: it is the only right whose test ignores appearance altogether.

Q: If a rival copies how a product looks but changes how it works, which right applies?

A registered design, and often the trade mark system alongside it. The Designs Act forbids the application of the design or a fraudulent or obvious imitation of it to an article, judged by the eye alone, and a rival who kept the look while changing the mechanism is the textbook defendant under Section 22. The patent is silent here, because the mechanism was changed and the claims do not reach the imitation. A trade mark registration on a distinctive housing shape may also bite, and passing off reaches the overall get-up where the imitation confuses buyers, since the wrong there is the deception and not the copying. Copyright may protect the packaging artwork but not the product’s appearance once the design is industrially produced, because of the Section 15 rule. The verdict is to register the design before the look reaches the market.

Q: Can a recipe be protected, and if so by which right?

A recipe as a list of ingredients and instructions is an idea expressed in words, and no right protects the idea. Copyright protects the recipe as written, the particular text of the cookbook or the card, and forbids copying of that expression, but it cannot stop a cook who reads it and produces the dish, because the dish is not a copy of the text. A patent can protect a recipe in rare cases where it amounts to a novel, inventive process of manufacture, but an ordinary recipe fails the inventive step test. The trade mark protects the product’s name, not its contents. The right that actually protects most valuable recipes is none of the five: it is secrecy, enforced by confidentiality agreements with the people who must know, because a recipe that stays secret keeps its commercial value for as long as it is kept, and every statutory right here demands publication or expires by time.

Q: Which intellectual property rights can protect a mobile app?

Four of the five can touch an app, and each touches a different layer. Copyright protects the source code as a literary work, the graphics and interface art as artistic works, and the content as literary and musical works, all arising automatically. A trade mark protects the app’s name and icon, registered in the relevant classes. A patent may protect the app’s technical contribution, if the software produces a technical effect beyond the programme itself, on the construction of Section 3(k) confirmed in Ferid Allani v Union of India; it never protects the code as written. A design registration can protect distinctive interface or device aesthetics embodied in hardware accessories, but not the app as such. A geographical indication has no place in an app. The app’s own name is the enduring asset, the code is protected by copyright, and the technical contribution, if real, must be patented before the launch discloses it.

Q: Should a business register its trade mark or rely on passing off?

Register, in every case where the mark is registrable. Passing off is a real protection, preserved by Section 27(2), and a trader with established goodwill can succeed in it, but it requires proof of goodwill, misrepresentation and damage built from sales and market evidence in every single case, which makes each dispute longer and more expensive than the statutory action. The infringement plaintiff under a registration proves registration and a confusingly similar sign, and no more. Registration also deters: later applicants are examined against registered marks, and the register cleans the market cheaply. Passing off is the protection of the period before registration, of marks that were neglected, and of signs in use that cannot yet be registered; it is the remedy of last resort and should never be the plan where a registrable mark exists.

Q: For a regional product name, should producers choose a geographical indication or a collective mark?

The geographical indication is the natural route for the regional name itself, because it is built for the asset: a name identifying goods whose quality, reputation or characteristic belongs essentially to a place. It is held by an association of producers or a statutory authority, individual producers register as authorised users, and the term renews indefinitely, which matches the permanence of the place. A collective mark under the Trade Marks Act is the association’s own badge for its members’ trade channel, a private mark of the association rather than the region’s name. In practice the sound producers use both: the indication guards the regional name against misleading use by outsiders, and the collective mark brands the association’s own certified channel. Neither is available to an individual producer alone, which is the point: the asset is the place’s reputation, and the law refuses to let one trader fence it.

Q: What is the risk of claiming more rights over a product than the product can support?

Every weak layer is a weapon handed to the opponent. A patent claimed over something that was not new may be revoked on a counterclaim; a mark claimed over a non-distinctive or functional sign may be rectified off the register; a design claimed over a published appearance may be cancelled; each mechanism is available to the very defendant the right was meant to restrain. Indian courts can award costs against a party that has pressed an untenable claim, so the attempt to enforce the weakest layer can damage the credibility of the strongest one in the same suit. Over-claiming also publishes more: the patent application discloses the invention, the design registration discloses the appearance, and a layered filing programme is a systematic publication of the product timed to the owner’s own launches. The discipline is to layer only the rights that answer a distinct, realistic harm.

Q: Does layering several rights over one product make a dispute cheaper or costlier to fight?

Costlier, in almost every case, and the owner who layers should do so for strength and not for economy. Each right pleaded adds a defence to meet, a validity challenge to survive and a further stream of evidence, and a defendant faced with a patent, a design and a mark will attack all three, running revocation, cancellation and rectification counterclaims that the owner must each defend. The compensation caps of the design system and the proof burdens of copyright mean some layers are worth more as deterrents than as trial claims. Where layering pays is not in cost but in outcome: the imitator must design around the mechanism, the appearance, the name and the artwork at once, and at some point the imitation stops being a copy of the product that sells. File the layers that each answer a real harm, in the order the statutes force, and accept that a portfolio is an enforcement project, not a saving.

Q: Which right protects a product’s packaging and get-up?

Three rights meet on the package, and each guards a different part of it. Copyright protects the printed artwork and text as artistic and literary works against copying. A design registration protects a new container shape or surface pattern against imitation to the eye. The trade mark system, with passing off behind it, protects the total get-up, the combination of name, colours, layout and shape by which buyers recognise the goods on a shelf, against lookalikes that confuse. The division matters because each answers a different defendant: the one who reprints the artwork, the one who imitates the container, and the one who alters every element just enough to argue distinction while the whole still deceives on the shelf. Register the design on a new container before launch, register the mark and the label, and treat passing off as the remedy of last resort.

Q: When is keeping an invention secret a better choice than applying for a patent?

Secrecy is the better choice where the invention cannot meet the patentability thresholds but is hard to reverse engineer, and where the twenty-year term and the disclosure of publication would buy nothing the maker could not keep for longer by silence. It is also the choice where the invention’s commercial life is short: a process improvement that will be superseded in a few years may earn more from five years of lead time than from a patent that publishes the method in eighteen months and grants in several years. Secrecy is the wrong choice for a product the buyer can inspect and understand, because the secret is lost on the first sale, and it is no choice at all against the independent inventor, who owes nothing to a secret he never learned. The discipline of secrecy is contractual: agreements with everyone who must know, access kept narrow, and the unpublished period documented as carefully as a filing would be.