AI, Innovation and Ownership: Himanshu Deora on the Next Decade of Intellectual Property Law
Himanshu Deora is a Partner at King Stubb & Kasiva, specialising in Intellectual Property law. With over 14 years of experience, he has built a strong practice spanning trademarks, copyrights, patents, design protection, IP prosecution and high-stakes litigation. His work covers a wide spectrum, from advising startups to representing Fortune 50 companies, and includes enforcement actions, criminal proceedings, and cross-sector IP strategy. He has been recognized as the ASSOCHAM IP Practitioner of the Year 2024, ALB India Top IP Lawyer 2023, and featured in the Forbes India Legal Powerlist 2021.
We managed to ask him the following questions:
Intellectual property has become central to innovation-driven businesses. From your experience advising companies across sectors, how has the role of IP evolved in shaping long-term business strategy?
When I started practising IP law over a decade ago, most businesses treated intellectual property as a legal checkbox, something you dealt with when a problem arose. That mindset has shifted significantly, and I would say the transformation has been most visible in the last four to six years.
Today, IP is genuinely integrated into boardroom conversations. Companies across sectors, whether technology, FMCG, pharmaceuticals, or entertainment, are starting to recognise that their intangible assets often constitute their most valuable competitive advantages. A well-structured trademark portfolio, a defensible patent, or a strong copyright position can be a decisive factor when raising capital, entering new markets, or evaluating M&A opportunities.
What has particularly changed is the awareness around timing. I now routinely advise clients to think about IP protection at the ideation stage, not after launch. This shift in mindset, from reactive to proactive, is where the real value lies. For startups especially, a strong IP position can elevate a company’s valuation considerably and attract investor confidence. For established multinationals, it translates into market exclusivity and brand equity that competitors simply cannot easily replicate.
The challenge, of course, is that innovation cycles are faster than ever, and IP law must keep pace. This is where strategic advice becomes critical, helping clients decide not just what to protect, but how and where, and at what stage in the product lifecycle.
You regularly handle both IP prosecution and litigation. How does understanding the litigation landscape influence the way you advise clients on building and protecting their IP portfolios?
Prosecution and litigation are two sides of the same coin, and having a foot in both worlds gives me a perspective that I believe is genuinely useful to clients.
When I am filing a trademark or advising on a patent specification, I am already thinking about enforceability. A registration obtained without attention to distinctiveness, scope of coverage, or potential prior art conflicts may offer limited value when it is tested in court. I have seen cases where companies held substantial portfolios on paper, but those assets proved difficult to enforce because they had not been built with litigation in mind and there are strategical bluders made during the prosecution stage of the concerns IPs.
The Indian courts, particularly the Delhi High Court and the Bombay High Court, have developed a sophisticated body of IP jurisprudence over the last decade. Understanding how judges have approached issues like well-known marks, honest concurrent use, or the balance between design and trade dress protection informs how I counsel clients on prosecution strategy.
From my experience handling enforcement actions in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Madras, Bangalore, Shimla, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, and Jaipur, I know that criminal and civil enforcement mechanisms each have their own dynamics. Advising on portfolio building therefore involves calibrating the enforcement options that will be available down the line, whether that means civil injunctions, customs recordals, criminal complaints, or a combination of these. The strongest portfolios are those built with an enforcement architecture in mind from day one.
Counterfeiting and brand misuse remain persistent challenges for businesses. What enforcement strategies have proven most effective in protecting brands in today’s increasingly digital marketplace?
Counterfeiting has, unfortunately, proven to be remarkably resilient. It adapts to enforcement and migrates across channels, from physical markets to e-commerce platforms, and back into grey supply chains.
From my experience managing enforcement actions across several cities in India, what works is a layered and multifold strategy rather than any single tactic. The most effective approach combines civil enforcement before courts, including injunctions, Anton Piller orders, and John Doe orders where necessary, with coordinated criminal action, customs recordals, and targeted enforcement at the trade level.
Criminal enforcement remains an underutilized tool, but where executed properly, it has significant deterrent value. Coordinating with local authorities and having the right evidentiary architecture in place before a raid is critical. Many enforcement actions fail not because of weak law but because of inadequate groundwork.
For the digital environment specifically, platforms have become key partners in enforcement. Brand owners who maintain active notice-and-takedown programmes, build relationships with platform compliance teams, and use IP recordal mechanisms offered by marketplaces like Amazon and Flipkart tend to have far better outcomes than those who rely solely on court intervention.
Customs recordal is another powerful and underutilized tool. Recording trademarks with Indian Customs allows for interception at the border, which can be far more efficient than chasing infringers after goods have entered the market.
The one consistent lesson across all these strategies is that sustained, systematic enforcement, not sporadic action, is what ultimately changes behavior in the market
The digital economy has fundamentally changed the scale and speed of IP infringement. A counterfeit product that might have been sold out of a single market in one city can now reach consumers across the country, and internationally, within days through online channels. That compression of geography and time has required enforcement strategies to become equally dynamic.
The most significant adaptation has been the development of digital monitoring programmes. Brand owners are investing in technology-assisted surveillance of marketplaces, social media, and even messaging applications to identify infringing listings, lookalike accounts, and grey market activity. What was once done manually can now be partially automated, though human review remains essential for nuanced cases.
Platform-level enforcement has also matured considerably. The major e-commerce platforms have significantly improved their IP protection tools under regulatory and commercial pressure, and those tools work reasonably well for registered rights holders. However, the challenge remains with platforms that have weaker compliance frameworks, and with social commerce, including influencer-led and direct message-based sales, where traditional notice-and-takedown mechanisms are harder to operationalize.
From a legal standpoint, Indian courts have demonstrated a progressive and pragmatic approach by granting broad John Doe (Ashok Kumar) orders in appropriate cases. These orders equip brand owners with the ability to take action against unknown infringers across multiple platforms pursuant to a single judicial directive. Additionally, Indian courts have evolved robust remedies in the form of dynamic, dynamic+ and superlative injunctions, particularly to address online infringement and counterfeiting, where infringers frequently shift across websites and digital platforms. These mechanisms enable continuous and effective enforcement without the need for repeated court intervention, and represent a significant development in strengthening IP protection in the digital ecosystem.
The area I think needs the most attention is cross-border digital enforcement. Infringers operating from outside India but selling into Indian markets pose a jurisdictional challenge that requires more coordinated international response mechanisms than currently exist.
Artificial Intelligence is now capable of generating music, artwork, text and even product designs. In your view, what are the most pressing intellectual property questions that AI-generated content raises for lawyers and policymakers?
AI-generated content has surfaced a set of questions that intellectual property law, designed with human creators in mind, is genuinely ill-equipped to answer without legislative intervention.
The most fundamental question is authorship. Copyright law, both globally and under the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, contemplates a human author. When an AI system autonomously generates a work with minimal human creative input, the existing framework does not cleanly resolve who, if anyone, holds copyright, the developer of the AI, the user who provided the prompt, or no one at all. The absence of copyright creates its own problems, including the inability to prevent copying or to license the work commercially.
A second key concern relates to training data and potential infringement. Many AI models are trained on vast datasets comprising copyrighted works, such as text, images, and music, often without explicit licences. This raises questions around infringement, the applicability of doctrines such as fair use or fair dealing, and the rights of original creators against AI developers. While courts in jurisdictions like the United States and Europe have begun grappling with these issues, judicial engagement in India remains at a nascent stage, with early disputes such as the ANI v. OpenAI matter still pending.
Third, there is the question of AI-generated inventions and patent eligibility. The traditional requirement that an inventor be a natural person is being tested by systems that can autonomously generate technical solutions.
From a policymaking perspective, the most pressing need in India is a considered amendment or supplementary framework under the Copyright Act and the Patents Act that addresses these realities explicitly, rather than waiting for ad hoc judicial interpretation. The stakes, for India’s creative economy and its position in the global AI landscape, are significant enough to warrant proactive legislative attention.
AI tools are also beginning to assist with patent searches, trademark monitoring and legal research. How do you see technology changing the way intellectual property lawyers practise in the coming years?
Technology is already changing IP practice, and I think the pace of change will only accelerate. AI-assisted prior art searches have become significantly more efficient. Trademark monitoring, which previously required extensive manual review of watch notices, can now be supplemented by automated surveillance across registries, marketplaces, and social platforms. Legal research tools are getting sharper.
My view is that these developments are, on balance, positive for the profession, provided lawyers adapt rather than resist. The efficiency gains allow IP practitioners to focus more of their time on strategic analysis, client counselling, and advocacy, rather than the mechanical aspects of the job. That is a good outcome for clients and for practitioners who are willing to invest in developing expertise alongside these tools.
However, I am cautious about overstating what AI currently does well in IP practice. Trademark clearance, for instance, involves not just similarity analysis but contextual judgment about consumer perception, industry context, and enforcement risk, the kind of nuanced assessment that experienced practitioners develop over time and that AI tools do not yet reliably replicate. Patent claim drafting remains deeply technical and strategic. In litigation, the ability to read a judge, anticipate opposing counsel, and adapt arguments in real time is irreducibly human.
I think the IP lawyers who will thrive in the coming decade will be those who combine substantive depth with comfort using technology, who know enough to ask the right questions, evaluate AI outputs critically, and apply professional judgment where it matters most. The profession will change shape, but it will not be replaced.
You have worked with clients ranging from startups to Fortune 50 companies. What are some common IP mistakes that growing companies make when trying to protect their innovations or brands?
Across the spectrum from early-stage startups to mid-sized businesses preparing to scale, I see a handful of mistakes with remarkable consistency.
The most common is delay. Companies launch a brand or product, build market presence, and only then begin thinking about trademark registration or patent filing. In that time, third parties may have adopted similar marks, prior art may have accumulated against the invention, or the window for patent/ design protection may have closed. IP rights are largely first-come-first-served, and delay in filing is a risk that cannot always be remedied later.
The second is under-protection. Many companies register their core brand name but neglect logo variations, sub-brands, taglines, key product features, or domain names. They protect in India but not in the international markets they are planning to enter. The portfolio ends up with significant gaps that become apparent only when enforcement becomes necessary.
The third mistake, particularly prevalent among technology companies, is inadequate management of IP ownership within employment and contractor relationships. Trade secrets leave with key employees. Software developed by freelancers is assumed to belong to the company when it legally may not. Founder IP from pre-company projects is not properly assigned. These gaps can be deeply problematic in due diligence situations or when disputes arise.
Fourth, growing companies often underestimate the value of a freedom-to-operate analysis before product launch. Operating in the dark about third-party IP rights creates infringement exposure that is far more costly to resolve after the fact.
The underlying theme across all of these is the same: IP strategy needs to be built alongside business strategy, not bolted on afterward.
India’s innovation ecosystem is expanding rapidly, particularly in technology, pharmaceuticals and digital platforms. What role should intellectual property law play in encouraging innovation while maintaining fair competition?
This is one of the most interesting and consequential questions in IP policy, and India occupies a particularly nuanced position in this debate.
India’s pharmaceutical sector has long been at the centre of the tension between patent protection and public access, a tension codified in provisions like Section 3(d) of the Patents Act, which sets a higher bar for patent eligibility for new forms of known substances. That provision has been both celebrated globally as a public health safeguard and criticised by innovator companies as a barrier to investment. Navigating that balance remains an ongoing challenge.
In technology and digital platforms, the picture is different. India’s software industry has historically operated in an environment with relatively limited patent enforcement, which arguably contributed to its growth as a services and product hub. As Indian companies transition from service providers to product innovators, there is growing appreciation within the ecosystem for stronger IP protection, and a corresponding responsibility on the legal community to help companies build and enforce rights effectively.
My view is that IP law functions best when it provides meaningful incentives for genuine innovation, the kind that involves real investment, creative effort, and risk, without becoming a tool for foreclosing competition or blocking follow-on development. This requires not just well-calibrated legislation but also enforcement infrastructure that distinguishes between legitimate IP enforcement and misuse.
For India’s innovation ecosystem to reach its full potential, I think we need both stronger IP protection for genuine innovators and a more accessible IP enforcement system, particularly for startups and small businesses that currently find the cost and complexity of litigation prohibitive.
Many businesses still treat intellectual property protection as an afterthought. What strategic steps should organisations take to integrate IP protection into their business and brand development plans?
This is the question I find myself returning to most often in client conversations, because the answer is genuinely transformative for how organizations relate to their IP.
The starting point is an IP audit, a systematic inventory of what the company owns or uses, what is protected, what is exposed, and what has commercial significance. Most companies, when they go through this exercise for the first time, discover both assets – they did not know they had and vulnerabilities they had not identified.
From that baseline, IP strategy should be mapped to the business roadmap. If the company is planning geographic expansion, trademark protection in those markets needs to precede the launch, not follow it. If a new product line is in development, the IP team, internal or external, should be at the table during product development to identify patentable innovations, design protectable elements, and address any freedom-to-operate questions before commercialization.
Internal policies matter enormously. Employment agreements and contractor arrangements need IP assignment clauses. Confidentiality and trade secret policies need to be operationalized, not just documented. Research and development teams benefit from basic IP awareness training, knowing, for example, that public disclosure before a patent application can destroy patent rights.
IP valuation is the other dimension that I would encourage companies to take seriously. Understanding the value of IP assets, for licensing, for balance sheet purposes, or for due diligence, gives leadership a basis for investment decisions about protection and enforcement that intuition alone cannot provide.
Ultimately, integrating IP into business planning is a cultural shift as much as a legal one. Companies that make that shift find that their assets are better protected, their brand is more defensible, and their commercial position is stronger.
Looking ahead, what do you think will define the next decade of intellectual property law – stronger enforcement, technology-driven disputes, or entirely new categories of IP challenges?
I think the honest answer is all three, and they will not be neatly separable.
Technology will be the dominant driver of new IP challenges. Artificial intelligence, blockchain-based digital assets, the metaverse, and increasingly sophisticated biotechnology will each push at the boundaries of existing IP frameworks in ways we can partially anticipate but not fully predict. The questions around AI-generated content and AI inventors that are just beginning to surface in courts and legislatures today will have far-reaching implications for how IP law is structured globally.
On enforcement, I expect a significant upgrade in both tools and expectations. Cross-border digital enforcement, in particular, needs to become more effective. The current patchwork of national enforcement mechanisms is increasingly inadequate for an environment where infringement is global and instantaneous. There is pressure building, from brand owners, from platforms, and from governments, for more effective cooperation mechanisms, and I expect that pressure to produce results.
India specifically is at an interesting inflection point. The Courts have been issuing increasingly sophisticated and globally aware decisions in IP matters. Ongoing modernization of the IP offices, and greater alignment with international best practices are all positive developments. I am cautiously optimistic that India’s IP enforcement environment will be significantly stronger ten years from now than it is today.
The category I find most intellectually interesting, and perhaps most underappreciated, is the governance of IP in the context of artificial intelligence and data. As AI systems trained on proprietary data become strategic assets, and as questions of data ownership and licensing become commercially significant, we will likely need new frameworks that do not map neatly onto existing IP categories. That is the frontier I am watching most closely, and where I think the most important work in IP law over the next decade will be done.
