Legal Protection to Fashion Designs under Intellectual Property Rights in India

Unlike, most creative industries, fashion design is not adequately considered by Intellectual Property Law. Fashion design piracy occurs when someone reproduced or redistributed a part or all of a designer’s original design under the name of an unauthorized entity. A design piracy risk for designers who want to protect their creations is invasive, and mostly this occurrence has the potential impact on small independent fashion designers who employ online media to reach their audience, which allows a vast online exposure to their designs. Apart from small independent fashion designers, it is also seen that reputed fashion industries are also pirated where their designs are used to reproduce products in the cheap quality to sell at a cheap price. Therefore they lost their reputation and also revenue. Fashion design piracy is now a growing concern with the advent of technology because pirates are also very intelligent and steal someone’s design with full research. IPR regime is not enough to prevent fashion design piracy but if amended soon then it can reduce damages to the designers by making the penalty heavier. This article will give a glimpse of the IPRs protection available to fashion designs in India.