What I Learned About IP Law Across Three Countries

I have studied and worked with intellectual property law in India, England, and the European Union. They share a common vocabulary trade marks, patents, infringement, distinctiveness but the moment you step inside the system in each place, you realise the words mean different things in practice. This post is about the differences that surprised me most, and what they taught me about how IP actually works.

The same right, three different speeds

The first thing that strikes you is pace. In the UK, a straightforward trade mark application can reach registration in four to six months. The EUIPO moves at a similar clip for EU trade marks. In India, the same process takes twelve to twenty-four months on a good day, and opposition proceedings can stretch to two to five years. Between 2022 and 2025, a surge in filings overwhelmed the Indian Trade Marks Registry, pushing examination backlogs to eight to ten months before examiners even looked at an application. A recruitment drive in 2025 is starting to bring that down, but the gap remains enormous.

This is not just a bureaucratic inconvenience. Speed shapes strategy. In the UK and EU, a brand owner can file, register, and begin enforcement within a single business cycle. In India, you may be trading under an unregistered mark for over a year before you have a certificate in hand , which means your entire enforcement posture in the interim depends on common law rights and the doctrine of passing off. That is a fundamentally different way of protecting a brand.

Registration is not the whole story

In India, the first person to use a mark in commerce has superior rights, even over someone who registers it first. This "first-to-use" principle means that proving use through invoices, advertisements, customer testimony is central to enforcement. The Delhi High Court recently affirmed the doctrine of initial interest confusion, holding that even momentary confusion in an online marketplace counts as infringement. That kind of granular, evidence-heavy litigation is the norm.

The UK, by contrast, operates a first-to-file system. The first applicant generally has the stronger legal position, and while passing off offers some protection for unregistered marks, formal registration is king. The EU system works similarly through the EUIPO, but with the added complexity of a unitary right that covers twenty-seven member states at once a powerful tool, but one that comes with its own vulnerabilities. An EU trade mark that has only ever been used in one country can be challenged for non-use across the entire territory.

And since January 2026, there is a new wrinkle. Brexit cloned thousands of EU trade marks into the UK register as "comparable rights." But from the start of this year, those cloned marks must now show genuine use in the UK specifically. Use in the EU no longer counts. Any brand owner who relied on EU-wide activity to keep their UK comparable mark alive is now exposed to cancellation. That is a quietly devastating change for businesses that assumed their post-Brexit protection was automatic.

What three systems teach you

Studying IP in one jurisdiction gives you rules. Studying it in three gives you judgment. You start to see that the legal architecture is never neutral it reflects choices about what a society values. India's first-to-use system protects the trader who built goodwill through actual commerce. The UK's first-to-file system rewards the party who moved first on paper. The EU's unitary mark rewards scale, but punishes brands that cannot demonstrate continent-wide presence.

The most useful thing I took from working across these systems is a sense of where each one breaks down. India's common law protections are meaningful but painfully slow to enforce. The UK's post-Brexit register is clean and efficient, but it has created a generation of zombie marks — registrations that exist on paper with no underlying UK use. The EU system is powerful, but its sheer breadth means that a single non-use challenge can unravel protection in markets the brand owner never intended to abandon.

None of these systems is better than the others. Each has trade-offs that only become visible when you have worked inside more than one. That cross-jurisdictional perspective is what I want to bring to this blog not just reporting what the law says, but explaining what it means when you have to actually use it.

This is my first post for my blog. I will be writing fortnightly about intellectual property law - from trade marks and patents to copyright and the places where IP meets technology.