A Graphical User Interface, commonly known as a GUI, is the visual medium through which a user interacts with an electronic device or a machine. Instead of typing commands into a black screen, a user today taps icons, swipes menus, and navigates through visually designed layouts — whether on a smartphone, a laptop, a car dashboard, or a smartwatch. The term itself was coined in the 1970s to mark a departure from text-based, command-line interfaces (CLIs) that preceded it. Over the last two decades, as digital products have come to dominate everyday life, the GUI has evolved from being a mere functional necessity into a carefully designed, often heavily branded, visual asset — one that companies invest significant resources in creating and differentiating.
This raises an important legal question: can the "look" of a GUI be owned, and if so, under what law?
The Legislative Framework Governing GUI Registration in India
In India, the statute that governs the registration and protection of industrial designs — including, potentially, GUIs — is the Designs Act, 2000. The difficulty, however, is that the Act was drafted at a time when GUIs, in their modern form, were barely a consideration for the legislature. The definitions of "article" and "design" under Sections 2(a) and 2(d) of the Act were consequently not drafted with screen-based, digital interfaces in mind, and for years there was no separate classification for GUIs at all. A handful of registrations were granted by the Registrar of Designs, but these were typically squeezed into a miscellaneous or residual category, without any settled rationale.
Matters began to change with India's accession to the Locarno Agreement. The Locarno Classification, established under the Locarno Agreement of 1968, is the internationally recognised system for classifying industrial designs for the purposes of registration. India became the 57th member to accede to the Agreement in 2019, and this was given domestic effect through the Designs (Amendment) Rules, 2021, which substituted Rule 10 of the Design Rules, 2001. This amendment aligned India's design classification with the current edition of the Locarno Classification.
Significantly, this brought into the Indian system Class 14 — "Recording, telecommunication, or data processing equipment" — which contains the sub-class 14-04, titled "Screen Displays and Icons". This sub-class expressly lists items such as graphic symbols for screen display, graphical user interfaces (computer screen layouts), icons for computers, and web banners. Separately, Class 32 was also made available for two-dimensional graphic designs, graphic symbols, and logos, provided the essential ingredients of an "article" and a "design" under Sections 2(a) and 2(d) of the Act were satisfied.
While this amendment was widely seen as a positive administrative signal, it did not, by itself, resolve the underlying legal question — a classification system is a filing and search tool, not a source of substantive legal rights.
For this reason, the registrability of GUIs in India remained under a cloud of uncertainty for years after the 2021 amendment. The Designs Office, acting through its Controllers, repeatedly rejected GUI-related design applications on a fairly consistent set of grounds: that a GUI is not an "article" because it cannot be made or sold separately from the underlying device; that it is not "applied" to an article "by any industrial process" since it is merely software; that it lacks "permanence" because it disappears the moment the device is switched off; and that, in any event, GUIs are already protected as "artistic works" under the Copyright Act, 1957, making dual protection under the Designs Act impermissible. This position found its most prominent articulation in the Controller's order dated 6 July 2023 in UST Global (Singapore) vs. Controller of Patents and Designs, which for a period became the go-to precedent for refusing GUI registrations.
This uncertainty persisted until March 2026, when the Calcutta High Court, sitting in its Intellectual Property Rights Division, delivered a judgment that comprehensively addressed — and rejected — this restrictive approach.
The case and the question before the Court
The judgment was delivered on 9 March 2026 by Justice Ravi Krishan Kapur in a batch of statutory appeals filed under the Designs Act, 2000, before the Calcutta High Court (Original Side, IPR Division), reported as 2026:CHC-OS:69. The appeals — filed by NEC Corporation, ERBE Elektromedizin GmbH, Abiomed Inc., and TVS Motor Company Limited — all arose out of orders of the Controller of Patents and Designs rejecting design applications relating to GUIs, display panels, and display units, on grounds ranging from the absence of an "article," to the alleged absence of an "industrial process," to lack of permanence and want of reasoning. Mr. Adarsh Ramanujan, Advocate, assisted the Court as Amicus Curiae.
The common question framed by the Court was direct: "Whether Graphic User Interface (GUI) satisfies the criteria of a design making it eligible for registration under the Act?"
On the meaning of "article"
The Court held that the definitions of "article" under Section 2(a) and "design" under Section 2(d) had been construed by the Designs Office in an unduly narrow and restrictive manner. Section 2(d) requires only that a design be applied to an article — it does not require the design itself to be the article. The design and the article, the Court reasoned, are therefore distinct and separable concepts, and the relevant "article" for a GUI can vary from case to case: it could be the display unit, the hardware component, or the finished consumer product such as a phone, tablet, or vehicle dashboard. The expression "article of manufacture" was held to be broad and generic, and the Court expressly disapproved of any interpretation that ties "article" down to a purely physical or tangible embodiment, noting that such an approach would exclude GUIs, icons, animations, and screen-based designs altogether merely because they exist in digital or virtual form. In this context, the Court also drew support from comparative jurisprudence, including the U.S. Supreme Court's observation in Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. vs. Apple Inc. that "article" is a broad term covering anything made by hand or machine, and the U.S. Federal Circuit's finding in Microsoft Corp. vs. Corel Corp. that even software can qualify as an "article of manufacture."
On "applied to an article by any industrial process"
The Court found that the Controller's reliance on a narrow, restricted meaning of "industrial process" — confined only to manual, mechanical, or chemical processes — ignored the word "any" preceding the phrase in Section 2(d), which signals a deliberately broad interpretation. Applying the principle of "updating construction" (i.e., that legislation, particularly IP legislation, must be read to account for technological advancement since its enactment), the Court held that the process of displaying or rendering a GUI on a screen — involving the systematic manipulation of electronic signals and precise rendering through hardware — squarely fits within the evolving concept of an industrial process.
On "permanence" and visibility
The Court rejected the requirement of "permanence" as a precondition for design protection, holding that Section 2(d) nowhere requires a design to be permanently visible or permanently affixed. Relying on foreign precedent such as In re Hruby and K.K. Suwa Seikosha's Design Application, the Court held that a design which becomes visible only when an article is put to its intended use (for instance, a lit lampshade or an activated watch display) does not cease to be a design merely because its visibility depends on an external condition such as the device being switched on. The Controller's objection that a GUI is visible only when the device is turned "ON" was accordingly held to be hyper-technical and legally unsustainable.
On "finished article" and functionality
The Court clarified that the term "finished article" is not defined in the Act and must be read contextually. A GUI may be applied at an intermediate stage of a product's design and development, much like a pattern applied to a car's front grille before the grille is assembled into the finished vehicle. The Court also drew a distinction between the functional aspect of a GUI (how it operates) and its ornamental aspect (how it looks), holding that a design is disqualified from protection only where its appearance is solely dictated by function, leaving no room for aesthetic or eye-appeal choices — GUIs, which typically involve creative choices in layout, colour palette, iconography and arrangement, would ordinarily not fall into this excluded category.
On the Locarno Classification
While reiterating that the Locarno Classification is, in itself, only of "administrative character" and cannot by itself create or exclude rights, the Court held that its incorporation into Indian law through Rule 10(1) of the Design Rules — including sub-class 14-04 for "Screen Displays and Icons" — is nonetheless strong evidence of legislative and administrative intent to recognise and protect digital designs and GUIs, provided the substantive requirements of Sections 2(a) and 2(d) are independently satisfied.
On the overlap with copyright ("no dual protection")
Addressing the argument that GUIs, being protectable as "artistic works" under the Copyright Act, 1957, cannot also be registered as designs, the Court held that a GUI is a visual configuration displayed on an article, and is not itself a computer programme or literary work merely because it is generated by underlying software code. The Court relied heavily on the recent Supreme Court decision in Cryogas Equipment (P) Ltd. vs. Inox India Ltd., which laid down a two-pronged test to resolve the design–copyright overlap: first, whether the work is purely an "artistic work" entitled to copyright protection, or a "design" derived from such artistic work and subjected to an industrial process; and second, if it does not qualify for copyright protection, whether the "functional utility" test is satisfied so as to qualify it for design protection instead. Applying this framework, and noting that the statutory scheme itself (Section 15 of the Copyright Act, 1957) already reconciles the two regimes by providing that copyright ceases once a design is registered, or once an article bearing the design has been reproduced more than fifty times by an industrial process, the Court held that there is no inherent bar to GUIs being registered as designs.
On foreign decisions
The Court held that the blanket refusal by the Controller to even consider foreign decisions was contrary to settled Supreme Court authority recognising that foreign decisions carry high persuasive value, particularly where Indian statutory definitions are pari materia with those in the foreign jurisdiction concerned (as reaffirmed in Cryogas Equipment). The Controller's own order in UST Global (Singapore), which had rejected such comparative reliance, was accordingly held to be based on a misconstruction of the Act and required to be read subject to the Court's findings.
The final directions
Having answered the reference in favour of registrability, the Court set aside the impugned orders passed in each of the five appeals and remanded all the matters to the Controller for a fresh hearing, with directions that the Controller now apply the correct legal tests — namely, that a GUI is not, as a category, incapable of design protection, and that registrability must be assessed on a case-to-case basis by examining whether the specific design features (shape, configuration, pattern, ornamentation) are properly identified with an article, are applied through an industrial process broadly understood, and are not purely functional.
Lacunae That Remain in Design Registration and Litigation
Even after this welcome clarity, several practical and doctrinal gaps remain unaddressed — both by the 2021 Rules and, necessarily, by a single judicial pronouncement.
First, the Act offers no guidance on the extent to which dynamic interfaces can be protected. Modern applications rely heavily on interactive components, animated transitions, gesture-based navigation, and adaptive layouts that change in response to user behaviour. Whether such a changing set of screens should be treated as one design or as multiple, separately protectable designs remains an open question, and one that the current filing and disclaimer practices (such as the use of dotted or dashed lines to indicate disclaimed portions) do not fully resolve.
Second, the standard for infringement of a GUI design is far from settled. Conventional design infringement analysis typically compares the visual features of two tangible products side by side. Applying the same method to a software interface is considerably more complex: should a court compare the overall user experience created across a sequence of screens, or assess each screen individually? And where an interface is shaped by industry-wide usability conventions and accepted design norms — such as a hamburger menu icon or a standard slider — how much similarity between two products should be treated as infringing rather than as a shared, functionally-driven convention? Indian courts have not yet had occasion to develop a considered framework for these questions.
Third, while the Calcutta High Court's judgment lays down the correct legal tests, its actual application will still depend heavily on how the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks — and future benches — apply these principles on a case-by-case basis. The absence of a comprehensive statutory amendment (as opposed to a judicial interpretation and a rules-level classification change) means some residual uncertainty at the level of day-to-day prosecution before the Designs Office is likely to persist until legislative clarification follows.
The Calcutta High Court's judgment marks the first considered judicial resolution of a question that had lingered, unresolved, in the Designs Office for years. By rejecting an overly literal and restrictive reading of "article," "design," and "industrial process," and by applying the principle of updating construction to account for technological change, the Court has brought India's design law closer to the position followed in other major jurisdictions — while leaving enough room for future courts and the Designs Office to work out the finer, unresolved questions around dynamic interfaces and infringement standards on a case-by-case basis.