BRIGHTO AUTO INDUSTRIES Vs. B CHAWLA AND SONS

JUDGEMENT

(1.) MESSRS B.Chawla and Sons, a firm owned by Raj Chawla are manufacturing rear view mirrors. Their design of this mirror was registered under No. 139585 in class 1 under the Designs Act, 1911 on 28.2.1972. The present petition has been preferred by MESSRS Brighto Auto Industries, a partnership firm, engaged in the manufacture of various articles, including rear view mirrors. or the cancellation of the aforesaid design. It has been urged that MESSRS B. Chawla and Sons' design was not a new design, that it had no originality about it, that such designs were common in the market and that the respondents made a false claim as to their being originators of the said design before the Controller of Patents and Designs to obtain the impugned registration. According to the petitioners they are hindered in their trade by the registration of the aforesaid design and being aggrieved they are interested to apply for its removal from the register.

(2.) THE respondents have controverted the petitioners, pleas and urged that the design in question was invented by them after a good deal of hard labour.

(3.) IN the case before me the respondent's counsel has conceded that there were mirrors available in the market rectangular in shape with rounded edges, width sides curved or sloping and the lower side also sloping as is the case with their own design and the only charge incorporated by them is a further curve in the sloping upper length side. The rear view mirrors previously selling in the market did not carry this type of curve on their upper side, it cannot be denied, but this innovation would appear by itself on a fair assessment to be too petty to earn for them the credit due to a new or original design. The addition of the said small feature could not possibly have involved any appreciable intellectual endeavour and it shall have to be termed as a routine type of trade variation. I am constrained to find that the respondent's design being neither new nor original it does not deserve protection to the detrement of the trade in general and by granting the petition I order cancellation of the registration of the said design under Section 51A of the Designs Act, 1911. The parties are left, however, to bear their own costs.