Trademark Rights and Creative Expression: Rethinking Film Title Protection in India
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Abstract
Film titles sit awkwardly within Indian intellectual property law. The Supreme Court has confirmed that a title alone is not a "work" in which copyright subsists, while High Court authority treats titles as capable of functioning as trade marks once secondary meaning is shown. The resulting position is settled at its extremes and unstable in its middle: courts agree that titles are not copyright subject matter and that iconic titles such as Sholay deserve protection, but they have articulated no consistent method for the large intermediate class of ordinary-language titles over which producers increasingly assert exclusivity. This article reconstructs, evaluates and improves the analytical basis on which those disputes are decided. It uses secondary data exclusively, combining doctrinal analysis of Indian primary authorities, a structured narrative review of literature retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, HeinOnline, JSTOR, SSRN, Google Scholar and Indian legal databases, and functional comparison with the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, Australia and Canada. Three doctrinal patterns recur: secondary meaning operates as a gate that no judgment has furnished with a key; delay and acquiescence function as the field's hidden ratio, displacing substantive reasoning; and Article 19(1)(a) is absent from title disputes despite being plainly engaged. The theoretical contribution is the Creative–Commercial Balance Frameworka four-stage, fourteen-factor model that separates trade mark function from creative significance and attaches proportionate rather than binary remedies. Applied to the decided cases, it reproduces their outcomes while making the reasoning explicit and reviewable.
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