India’s design ecosystem has grown rapidly over the last few years. Indian Design Office emerged as the fastest growing office, with 43.2% increase in filings in a year. Domestic applicants accounted for about 90% of total design filings in 2024-25 driven largely by startups, MSMEs, and design-intensive industries such as fashion, electronics, packaging, and digital products. This growth reflects a larger shift in how Indian businesses view design not merely as aesthetics, but as a commercial and strategic asset. 


However, the Designs Act, 2000 was drafted in a very different technological and industrial context with focus to the tangible articles and the definitions of the same reflect the fact. At the time, design protection was closely linked to physical products and traditional manufacturing processes. In the today’s context the same cannot be applied as the innovation is increasingly digital and further it is also largely dependent on the digital infrastructure. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs), icons, animations, and virtual designs play a central role in consumer experience across sectors such as fintech, e-commerce, gaming, and software. The existing legal framework does not adequately address this reality, creating uncertainty for designers and businesses alike.

To counter the abovementioned issues and to bring the Design Act, 2000 upto the latest standard and align it with the international laws and treaties. The following amendments are proposed in the current Designs Act, 2000:

• Extending design protection to virtual designs by making material changes to the definition of ‘article’ and ‘design;
• Introduction of full grace period of 12 months;
• Introduction of the option of deferring publication of design for up-to 30 months;
• Introduction of timeline relief provision in alignment with Designs Law Treaty;
• Statutory Damages;
• Revision to term of protection;
• Introduction of multiple designs filings (in a single application);
• Option for division of applications;
• Introduction of a Chapter on international registrations, enabling filings under Hague;
• Other misc. changes aligned with DLT and Hague Agreement.

At the core, the proposed amendments to the Design Act, 2000 seek to reposition the act from a manufacturing era statute into an innovation era statute. The amendments aim to make India’s design law suitable for today’s technological reality by expressly incorporating the virtual designs like GUI within the definition of “design” to simplify procedures so that registration and enforcement become more efficient and business-friendly and to align India’s design system with international standards to ensure that Indian designers can easily protect their designs abroad while foreign applicants can confidently seek protection in India. While the amendment appears to acknowledge the current digital expansion, it leaves a critical gap by failing to anticipate the evolving role of Artificial Intelligence in design. By not explicitly broadening the framework of the statute to cover AI-driven innovations, the statute risks becoming outdated as AI applications continue to grow, effectively creating a loophole that limits protection for future technological developments.

At a minimum, the amendments should acknowledge AI-assisted and AI-generated designs, clarify that protection hinges on human creative contribution, and empower the rule-making authority to issue examination guidelines addressing AI-related disclosures and ownership. This would ensure that the reformed Designs Act is genuinely future-proof rather than merely technology-adjacent. While the introduction of statutory damages is intended to strengthen enforcement, the proposal to impose a fixed upper cap of INR 50 lakhs risks being both under-inclusive and conceptually inconsistent with damages jurisprudence. Damages in IP law are fundamentally compensatory in nature and are meant to reflect the actual loss suffered by the right holder and/or unjust enrichment of the infringer, particularly  cases involving large-scale commercial exploitation. 


Rather than prescribing a hard upper limit, a more balanced approach would be to:

1. Treat statutory damages as a fallback mechanism where actual damages are difficult to prove, without restricting courts from awarding higher compensatory damages where evidence permits; and
2. Provide guiding factors or indicative bands (e.g., scale of infringement, duration, turnover of infringer, wilfulness) while preserving judicial discretion to award damages commensurate with real economic harm.