India Recognises Its First Smell Trademark: Rose Scent for Tyres
Sumitomo Rubber Industries’ application to register a rose-like fragrance for tires (Class 12) has been approved by India’s Trade Marks Registry, marking the first acceptance of an olfactory trademark for advertisement. The application was first challenged under Sections 9(1)(a) and 2(1) (zb) for lacking distinctiveness and graphical representation. However, with the help of amicus curiae Pravin Anand and the adoption of a seven-dimensional scent vector created by IIIT Allahabad, which met the statutory representation requirement, the application progressed. Sumitomo established that the fragrance, which has nothing to do with tires, is arbitrary, distinctive, and able to serve as a trade-origin indicator by relying on earlier UK recognition of the same scent mark. Under Section 20, the Controller General has ordered that the mark be promoted as an olfactory trademark.
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The Pokémon Company / Nintendo (collectively “Nintendo”) and PocketPair (makers of the 2024 smash hit video game Palworld).
The Director of USPTO has last week ordered the re-examination of a recently granted US patent in the name of Nintendo Co. Ltd and The Pokémon Company. This power has been exercised on the Director’s own initiative. What makes it bizarre that this has been initiated without any apparent application by a third party.
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Getty Images v Stability AI
On November 4, 2025, the UK High Court finally delivered its much-watched decision in Getty Images vs. Stability AI, one of the highest profile clashes between a traditional image library and an AI image generator. Getty claimed that Stable Diffusion was trained on millions of its photographs scraped without consent and argued that importing the trained model into the UK amounted to secondary copyright infringement, and that the AI outputs carrying distorted Getty watermarks infringed its trademarks and constituted passing off. The Court held that the trained Stable Diffusion model does not store copies of Getty’s images and therefore is not an “infringing copy” for secondary infringement, even though Getty’s content was used during training. However, the Court did find limited trademark infringement for outputs bearing the Getty watermark, treating Stability AI itself as responsible for those infringing images rather than the end users.
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Chinese Court Found AI-Generated Pictures Not Copyrightable – Convergence with the U.S. Standard? – KWM – Seagull Song
A recent Chinese ruling has taken a strict view on authorship in AI generated images. In this case, the court held that Midjourney outputs were not eligible for copyright protection because the user provided only broad prompts and could not show any concrete creative control or reproducible input. The judge concluded that the images were primarily the product of the AI system rather than human creativity. The court also noted that prompts themselves are unprotectable ideas. This stands in sharp contrast to an earlier Beijing Internet Court decision that recognized AI assisted images as copyrightable when detailed human involvement was demonstrated.
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Dentons
