The second edition of Eashan Ghosh’s 2020 book “Imperfect Recollections: The Indian Supreme Court on Trade Mark Law” is out now! Eashan shares a short extract from the book’s Preface, highlighting the stimuli for the second edition. Eashan has been practicing as an intellectual property advocate and consultant in New Delhi since 2011 and has also authored numerous guest posts for us (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
Book Release: Second Edition of “Imperfect Recollections: The Indian Supreme Court on Trade Mark Law”
By Eashan Ghosh
I am delighted to take this opportunity to share with SpicyIP readers the release of the second edition of my book, Imperfect Recollections: The Indian Supreme Court on Trade Mark Law (Thomson Reuters, 2024, ISBN: 978–93–95696–95–1). The book is available for order online here, here, and here (please check your delivery area for availability). It is also linked on the IP Books section of this blog.
A part-wise summary of the first edition is here. A short extract from the Preface to the Second Edition is presented below.
“The first week of August 2021 was a critical hinge in the modern history of Indian trade mark law. It saw the introduction into Parliament of a law that proposed to terminate the 15+ year tenure of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB), the country’s specialist intellectual property tribunal. At the time, perhaps naïvely, I assumed that any legislation pushing through a change so fundamental would require time to be carefully evaluated. When the proposal was tabled in Parliament on August 2, I suspect a straw poll among legal practitioners across the country would have confirmed that mine was far from an isolated opinion. Instead, by August 9, the deed was done. The Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021 sailed through Parliament. Never had the old saying rung out with such force: there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
Trade mark cases had dominated the docket of the erstwhile IPAB. They rested nervously on scaffolding that bridged the IPAB’s substantive trade mark jurisdiction with the rest of the judiciary. Much of this scaffolding had been built atop Supreme Court case law. All of it was blown to bits by this singular, decades-long week in August 2021. As thousands of ongoing disputes were cut adrift from the IPAB, India’s trade mark ecosystem came under enormous strain. Now, over [three] years on from the 2021 Act, the story of how this drastic change has affected the broader meta of Indian trade mark law and practice may finally be told. Taking up the gauntlet to do so has been a considerable motivation behind preparing a second edition of Imperfect Recollections.
There has been another key stimulus for this second edition. It has been rooted in documenting the breathless pace of development of doctrinal trade mark law in India. Jurisdiction claims in trade mark cases, for instance, are increasingly being judged against Supreme Court and High Court precedent that appear to be in tetchy conflict. Trade mark similarity cases, to take another example, have recently gathered around enterprising new styles of inquiry that are as savvy as they are controversial. Trade mark courts have also been attempting, of late, to reconcile starkly divergent Supreme Court opinions on the requirement for domestic goodwill in prior use cases. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court itself, the skew towards summary treatment of trade mark cases has unmistakably crossed the line between innocent tendency and deliberate policy. Restatements on portions of the Trade Marks Act that have been hollowed out by the changes wrought by the 2021 Act are, of course, entirely new. On each of these issues – and several others besides – the conversation has shifted appreciably since I drew the curtain on the first edition of Imperfect Recollections in March 2020.”
I am happy to take questions about the book, and welcome comments and feedback. Please feel free to reach out to me on e-mail or on my Medium page.