Breaking down the key parts of the Supreme Court’s decision in Cryogas Equipment Private Limited v. Inox India Limited and Others, Aditya Bhargava discusses the jurisprudence on the difference between copyright and industrial designs and the two-pronged test to distinguish between the two intellectual properties adopted by the Court in this case. In Part II of the post, he’ll discuss the question of “functional utility”. Although the post points out that the Court has not discussed Section 52(1)(w) of the Copyright Act, discussion on that aspect is saved for a future post. Aditya is a third-year law student at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. His previous posts can be accessed here.
[Part I] Cryogas Judgment: Supreme Court Stops Copyright from ‘Gaslighting’ Design
By Aditya Bhargava
The Supreme Court’s recent judgment in Cryogas Equipment Pvt. Ltd. v. Inox India Ltd. (2025) has addressed an important question: when does a creative work stop being “art” and become an “industrial design” outside the realm of copyright?
The case arose from Inox’s claim that Cryogas copied proprietary engineering drawings for cryogenic storage tanks (mounted on trailers for transporting liquid gases). Inox sued for copyright infringement of these technical drawings, essentially arguing that its design of the tanker and internal parts was protected as an “artistic work” under copyright. Cryogas (and a co-defendant) countered with Section 15(2) of the Copyright Act, 1957 – proviso that bridges (and barricades) the realms of copyright and design law.
Section 15(2) basically says: if an artistic work is applied to an industrial product and over 50 copies are made, the work’s copyright protection vanishes; the creator should have opted for a Designs Act registration instead. This provision prevents someone from getting perpetual copyright over what is essentially a mass-produced design, since the Designs Act 2000 offers only a time-limited monopoly for industrial designs. In Cryogas, the Court had to decide if Inox’s drawings were truly artistic works (like engineering “art” that merited life-long copyright) or just unregistered industrial designs in disguise (and thus copyright-barred by Section 15(2)).
To add spice, the suit’s journey has been a procedural rollercoaster: the trial court initially dismissed Inox’s suit (presumably agreeing that copyright didn’t subsist), the High Court ordered a fresh trial, and now the Supreme Court has weighed in. But leaving aside the procedural saga of Order VII Rule 11 CPC (which the Supreme Court wisely set aside for now), the core question remained – where to draw the line between artistic works and designs in Indian law.
The stakes are high and the discussion isn’t just academic: choose wrongly and you either give someone a 60+ year monopoly for a product design or leave genuine creative artists with no protection if their art gets industrially applied.
Interestingly, in this case, no party argued the application of Section 52(1)(w)- which exempts making a 3D object from a 2D artistic work, for industrial application of any functional part of a useful device. As highlighted by Prashant Reddy T. here, courts and CCI have not interpreted the application of this provision despite numerous chances and it looks like this is another instance where the opportunity was missed. I’ll save the discussion on this point for the future, and in this two-part post, I unpack the Supreme Court’s reasoning and engagement with the distinction between artistic works and designs. In the first part, I trace how jurisprudence has evolved from the Microfibres case in 2006 up to the present case. I also dissect the two-prong test laid down by the apex court. In the second part, I address the question of “functionality utility” and examine how it informs the two-prong test.
- From Microfibres to Tupperware: Drawing the Line in Prior Cases
This tussle between copyright and design protection isn’t new and has been covered on this blog at multiple instances. (Read here, here, here and here) Indian courts, especially the Delhi High Court has grappled with it in a series of cases – some involving fabric patterns, kitchenware, board games, even toothbrushes – which now has essentially paved the way for the present Supreme Court’s ruling. A starting point was Microfibres Inc. v. Girdhar & Co. (Delhi High Court 2006) (Read here) where an American company claimed copyright over upholstery fabric patterns that it had registered as “artistic works.” The Delhi High Court (Single Judge) denied copyright, holding that these were not standalone artistic creations like paintings but were meant to be applied industrially on textiles. The judgment noted several factors: the motifs themselves lacked originality; the arrangement was created for industrial use (fabric prints have no independent existence as art); textile designs fall squarely under the Designs Act’s subject matter (Class 5 of Design Rules); and the legislature intended that commercially exploited designs get only short-term protection, unlike pure art. In short, since the patterns were essentially industrial designs, the court refused to label them “artistic works” for copyright – design law, not copyright, was the proper avenue. This Microfibres I decision set the tone that you can’t use the Copyright Act as a backdoor for perpetual protection of design motifs. ( the case has been covered in a three part post, here, here and here)
Subsequently, courts consistently followed this logic. In Dart Industries Inc. v. Techno Plast (Delhi HC 2007) (here), involving Tupperware container designs, the court held that once a product design is registered under the Designs Act, it enjoys design protection only – no dual copyright claim survives. Even technical drawings that lead to a product shape were denied copyright if the product design itself was protectable via designs law. The underlying message was clear (and was explicitly spelled out in Dart): if a work’s intended use is to create a product’s shape, then copyright cannot be later invoked to extend monopoly after mass manufacture. An oft-cited British case, Warner Bros. v. Roadrunner (1988), was relied to distinguish scenarios – if an artistic drawing is later applied industrially, the prior existing copyright might survive; but if the drawing was from the get-go created for industrial application, then Section 15(2) steps in to deny copyright. Dart observed that this is perhaps why Section 15 exists – to say “once you go design, you don’t go back (to copyright)” .
Other examples reinforced this approach. In Mattel Inc. v. Jayant Agarwalla (Delhi HC 2008) (here), Mattel argued its famous SCRABBLE board and letter tile designs were “artistic works” (since versions of the game from the 1930s were copyrighted). The court disagreed, refusing an interim injunction because the 3D board and tiles were articles produced well beyond 50 copies – thus falling under the Designs Act domain, not copyright. By contrast, if an artist’s painting or sculpture is later used as a model for reproductions, courts have noted that the original artwork’s copyright continues for the full term (the Designs Act itself excludes paintings, sculptures, drawings etc. from its definition of design). In other words, a Mona Lisa on a mug doesn’t lose her copyright aura just because you printed 50 mugs – pure art stays protected. But an industrial design (aesthetic created mainly for a product) gets at most 15 years of design monopoly, not life+60 copyright.
The Delhi High Court’s Division Bench in Microfibres (2009) – call it Microfibres II – affirmed this balancing exercise. The Court acknowledged that the statutory definition of “artistic work” is broad and quality-agnostic (even a rough sketch or a futuristic car doodle can qualify as an artistic work). However, the DB clarified that legislative intent and Section 15(2) must be given full effect: if a design is registered under the Designs Act (or even just capable of registration and mass-produced), its copyright protection is cut off after the 50-copy threshold. This harmonizes the two regimes – pure art gets longer protection; industrial art gets a short leash. The Division Bench put it neatly: once the threshold is crossed, “the work in question cannot be labelled as an ‘artistic work’” for copyright purposes. The Microfibres II ruling has since been followed nationwide, from jewelry designs (Pranda Jewelry v. Aarya, Bombay HC 2015) to amusement park designs (Fun World v. Nimil KK, Kerala HC 2020).
- Art or Design? The Supreme Court’s Two-Pronged Test
Faced with this backdrop, the Supreme Court in Cryogas v. Inox set out to distill a clear test. The Court noted that over time a bit of confusion had arisen in classifying works – after all, an “artistic work” and a “design” can start from the same origin (a drawing, a sculpture, etc.), blurring the lines. Below is the venn diagram used by the court to explain this.
To remove ambiguity, the SC formulated a “two-pronged approach” – essentially a stepwise inquiry for judges confronting such cases.
In the Court’s own words (para 60), the test is:
(i) determine “whether the work in question is purely an ‘artistic work’ entitled to protection under the Copyright Act or whether it is a ‘design’ derived from such original artistic work and subjected to an industrial process” (language echoing Section 15(2));
(ii) if the work doesn’t qualify for copyright protection (i.e. it’s effectively a design post-industrial use), then “apply the test of ‘functional utility’ to determine its dominant purpose, and ascertain whether it would qualify for design protection under the Designs Act.”
In simpler terms, Step 1: classify the work – art or applied design? Step 2: if it’s an applied design (no copyright), check if it’s protectable as a design (or is it too functional to even count as a design?).
This two-pronged test cleverly engages with decades of case law. The first prong essentially codifies the Section 15(2) trigger: Was the work initially an artistic creation existing independently, or was it created for the purpose of industrial reproduction? If it’s the former, it’s a bona fide artistic work (copyright subsists unless and until perhaps 50+ copies are made – and even then, some nuances apply). If it’s the latter, then under Section 15(2) it shouldn’t enjoy copyright once mass-produced. The Court here leaned on the refined view from Microfibres II: an artistic work can certainly be something with no inherent “art for art’s sake” quality (a blueprint can be art under the Act), but the law deliberately withdraws copyright if that art is used as an industrial design beyond the allowed limit. For instance, a decorative engineering drawing might be creative, but if the only reason it exists is to build 100 identical tanks, it’s arguably moved to the “design” side of the fence. The Supreme Court noted that both statutes must be read in harmony, each protecting its own domain – the Copyright Act covering “pure” artistic expressions (even if later used industrially to a limited extent), and the Designs Act covering designs intended for commerce and replicated en masse. Inox’s proprietary drawings, on the face of it, were blueprints for tank parts – the question was whether they had any life as independent artistic works (like technical art) or were purely utilitarian schematics.
The second prong is where the Court broke new ground by explicitly requiring the “functional utility” test. This means even after deciding something is a design (not protected by copyright), the analysis isn’t over – one must ask: is this design the kind of design the Designs Act protects, or is it so functional that even design law wouldn’t cover it? The Supreme Court here is guarding against a scenario where a work falls between two stools – no copyright because it’s a design, but also no design protection because it’s purely functional. To avoid such an IP no-man’s land (which would effectively leave the creator with nothing but perhaps a patent route, if at all), the Court says to evaluate the dominant purpose of the design. If the design’s features are dictated purely by functional considerations (with no aesthetic element appealing to the eye), it might fail the design eligibility test (since Indian design law, like many others, doesn’t protect purely functional shapes). But if it does have aesthetic or visual appeal as a design, then it “qualifies” for design protection (provided registration etc.). Thus, prong 2 ensures that if something is too functional to be a design, it might remain a copyrightable technical drawing after all – a subtle point we’ll explore shortly.
In applying this two-step to the Cryogas facts, the Court didn’t outright decide whether Inox’s drawings had copyright – instead, it remanded the case for a fresh trial with this framework. The trial court is tasked to “discern the true nature” of the engineering drawings using the Supreme Court’s test. However, the writing is on the wall: if Inox’s drawings were principally to create cryogenic tank parts (which were indeed manufactured in numbers), Section 15(2) likely cuts off copyright. Inox might have been better off registering a design for the tank or its parts, but it didn’t – so it cannot now claim a backdoor perpetual protection by calling the drawings “art.” The Supreme Court’s analysis, while deferential in sending it back for evidence, leans heavily on the idea that Inox’s work was an industrial design at heart.
The two-pronged test is a clear message to future litigants: don’t try to pass off an industrial creation as fine art for long-term copyright, and conversely don’t ignore design registration if your work is aesthetic and reproducible.
This brings me to the end of the first part. In the second part of this post, I shall engage with the aspects of “functional utility” in greater detail and evaluate how the same informs the two-prong test laid down by the Supreme Court.