Opinion Why selling fake ‘Raymond’ clothes isn’t copyright crime: Punjab and Haryana High Court’s landmark clarification

“A plain reading of Section 13 of the Copyright Act makes it abundantly clear that copyright subsists only in respect of the specific classes of works enumerated therein. Garments or cloth, as such, do not fall within the ambit of the said provision,” the order said on January 23.

Section 13 of the Act deals with the works in which copyright subsists.

Findings

• Garments or cloth, as such, do not fall within the ambit of this provision. This issue is no longer res integra.
• While dealing with an identical controversy, the coordinate bench has categorically held that the manufacture or sale of garments using a particular brand name does not, by itself, attract the penal provisions of the Copyright Act.
• If the allegations in the FIR are taken at their face value, the same do not disclose the commission of offences under Sections 51 and 63 of the Act.
• Continuation of criminal proceedings on such allegations would, therefore, be nothing but an abuse of the process of law.
• We are conscious of the settled principle that inherent jurisdiction for quashing criminal proceedings is to be exercised sparingly.
• Even if allegations are accepted in their entirety, they do not constitute an offence, and where the proceedings suffer from fundamental legal infirmities, this Court would be failing in its duty if it permits such prosecution to continue.
• Allowing the present proceedings to go on would result in unnecessary harassment of the petitioner and would amount to misuse of the criminal justice system.

Background

• The petitioner moved the high court seeking to quash the FIR, arguing that the registered case against him under the Copyright Act constituted an abuse of process.
• An authorised representative of Raymond Company filed the complaint in 2021, alleging that petitioner-Bakshi Enterprises, owned by Davinder Pal Bakshi, was manufacturing and selling “combo packs” of spurious garments falsely branded as original Raymond products.
• Following a police raid at the petitioner’s premises in Ambala city, authorities recovered allegedly fake cloth branded as Raymond.
• An FIR was registered under Sections 51 and 63 of the Copyright Act, 1957, and the trial court subsequently framed charges against the petitioner in 2022.
• Appearing for the petitioner, advocate Munish Behl submitted that the threshold as the basic ingredient for the invocation of Sections 51 and 63 of the Copyright Act, 1957, is the existence of a “work” which is protected under the Act.
• It is argued that cloth, fabric, or garments do not find any mention in Section 13 of the Act, nor can they, by any stretch of imagination, be treated as a “work” protected under the Copyright Act.
• He further argued that, as per the allegations in the FIR, the petitioner was involved in the sale of garments or cloth allegedly bearing the brand name “Raymond”.
• Appearing for the state, Deputy Attorney General Himani Arora submitted that during the investigation, spurious goods bearing the branding of Raymond were recovered from the premises of the petitioner.
• It is further argued that upon consideration of the material collected during the investigation, the trial court found a prima facie case and framed charges against the petitioner.

Expert speak

Advocate Raheel Patel, Partner, Gandhi Law Associates, underlined the “salutary correction in law” the ruling provided by reaffirming settled statutory boundaries and arresting the tendency to invoke criminal copyright provisions in matters that are, in substance, trademark infringement or passing-off disputes.

“By holding that garments and fabrics do not qualify as ‘works’ within the meaning of the Copyright Act, the court has clarified that copyright law cannot be artificially expanded to address allegations of counterfeiting merely because remedies under the Trade Marks Act may be perceived as less expedient,” he said.

Patel continued, “For brand owners such as Raymond Ltd., the ruling underscores that enforcement action must be firmly anchored in the appropriate statutory framework and not pursued through indiscriminate registration of FIRs under inapplicable penal provisions. At a broader level, the decision reflects judicial reluctance to permit the criminal process to be used as a coercive shortcut in commercial intellectual property disputes, thereby strengthening legal certainty and proportionality in IP enforcement.”

Advocate Tushar Agarwal, Founder and Managing Partner, C.L.A.P. JURIS, noted that the ruling reiterates a settled but often misunderstood position of copyright law — that garments and fabrics, being utilitarian in nature, do not qualify as ‘artistic works’ unless they meet the statutory threshold.

“By quashing the criminal proceedings, the high court has sent a clear signal against the routine invocation of criminal law in commercial branding disputes, particularly where the issue may at best lie in trademark infringement and not copyright,” Agarwal said.

According to the lawyer, the judgment reinforced the need for law-enforcement agencies to carefully assess the nature of intellectual property claims before initiating criminal action and also brought much-needed clarity to the boundary between copyright and trademark law.

“Garments and fabrics, by themselves, do not attract copyright protection, and criminal proceedings cannot be sustained on an incorrect invocation of the Copyright Act. The Court has emphasised that commercial disputes must be addressed within the appropriate statutory framework, rather than through criminal process. This decision reinforces the doctrinal position that copyright does not extend to functional articles such as garments, except in limited circumstances expressly recognised by law,” Agarwal added.

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