China’s Latest Trademark Reforms Hold Lessons For India?

GoodAI Global, a reputed company of South Korea, spent more than a decade building Beauty of Joseon (product) into one of Korea’s best-known skincare exports before it began selling in India through e-commerce platforms in August 2022. By the time it applied to register its own mark in India someone else already had a device mark filed on a “proposed to be used” basis, meaning the applicant had never sold a single product under that name. It took a full rectification petition for the Delhi High Court to cancel that registration in January 2025, holding that what had happened amounted to bad faith under Section 11(10)(ii) of the Trade Marks Act, 1999^[1]. That should have ended such practice, but it did not. In July 2026, GoodAI was back before the same court, this time seeking an injunction against traders still using its trade dress, with the Court also directing Amazon to take down the listings.^[2]

Imagine spending years building a business. You choose a distinctive name, invest in a logo, cultivate goodwill among customers, and finally prepare to launch your product. Then comes an unexpected setback that someone else has already registered your trademark. They have never sold a product under that name, never built a business around it, and never intended to. Their only objective is to demand money from the rightful owner or force them into years of litigation.

This practice, known as trademark squatting, is no longer an occasional abuse of intellectual property law. It has evolved into a profitable business model, fueled by digital commerce, inexpensive online filing systems, and the rapid expansion of global markets^[3]. As businesses increasingly establish their presence online before opening a physical storefront, trademarks have become valuable commercial assets. Unfortunately, they have also become attractive targets for speculators^[4].

This is what trademark squatting costs a legitimate business in India: not the modest fee a speculator pays to file first, but years spent first in a rectification petition and then in a fresh suit, before the fight is anywhere close to over. GoodAI’s case is not unusual. Courts have read the same pattern into other filings for years now, most notably in BPI Sports LLC v Saurabh Gulati, where the Delhi High Court held that registering a mark with no intention of using it, purely to block or extract money from its rightful owner, is squatting and squatting is bad faith within the meaning of Section 11(10)(ii)^[5].

China is trying to close this loop before it opens, at a moment when the comparison is hard to avoid. Under the newly revised Trademark Law^[6] passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in June 2026, and due to take effect on 1 January 2027, an application filed with no real intention of using the mark, in a way that clearly exceeds what the applicant’s own business could reasonably need, can now be refused at the examination stage itself before it ever reaches the register.

Examiners can issue an office action asking the applicant to produce evidence of actual or intended use, and if the response does not hold up, the mark is refused without ever being published for opposition. The opposition window has also been shortened to two months, and the grounds on which anyone can oppose a bad-faith filing have been widened. Where bad faith is established and causes real harm, the applicant faces a fine of up to CNY 100,000 and an agency that knowingly assists faces fines that can reach CNY 200,000 in serious cases, and may be barred from practising before the trademark office altogether.

This reform does not only stop new bad-faith filings at the door. For marks that slip through and are already on the register, the revised law also lifts the usual five-year deadline for challenging a registration where the challenger holds a well-known mark and the registration was obtained in bad faith, an acknowledgment that some squatting only becomes obvious to its victim years after the fact, once the brand has grown enough to be worth stealing.

The reform also widens what counts as squatting in the first place. Copying, imitating or translating someone else’s well-known mark for unrelated goods is now squatting even if that mark was never registered in China, closing a gap speculators have long exploited by targeting global brands before they enter the Chinese market. The same applies to agents, distributors and business partners who file a principal’s mark in their own name while the commercial relationship is still running, and to anyone who pre-emptively registers something another party has already used and built a reputation around, a category the revised law extends beyond conventional “prior rights” to what it calls “prior lawful rights and interests,” expressly covering data rights, virtual property, and the commercial use of a character’s image or a work’s title.

None of this depends on the original owner noticing the theft, hiring counsel, and fighting it out over several years. The examiner does the first round of filtering. That is the real shift in the Chinese reform not any one provision, but the decision to treat trademark squatting as an administrative problem to be caught at the gate, rather than a private dispute to be sorted out afterwards between whichever two parties happen to end up in court.

India’s framework still runs almost entirely on the second model. The Trade Marks Act, 1999 examines applications on absolute and relative grounds of refusal under Section 9 and 11 of the Act, but nothing in that process asks whether the applicant actually intends to use the mark or is simply hoarding it. Bad faith becomes relevant only once someone opposes the application, or, if it slips through, only once the rightful owner later files a rectification petition under Section 57 of the Act. Even the one built-in check on hoarding, removal for non-use under Section 47, cannot be invoked until a mark has sat unused on the register for five years and three months. By design, the system waits for the damage to be done and then asks the injured party to undo it.

That gap matters more with every passing year. India’s Trade Marks Registry received more than 5.5 lakh applications in 2024-25 alone, part of an overall rise of nearly 20 per cent in intellectual property filings that year, and contested matters can now take roughly a year just to get a hearing listed^[7]. India has also crossed two lakh DPIIT-recognised start-ups, alongside millions of MSMEs that increasingly build a brand online before they open a single store. Filing a trademark today takes minutes and costs little and filing dozens of them under one name, across unrelated classes, with no business behind any of it, costs barely more. The Registry has no equivalent of China’s threshold question, whether a portfolio corresponds to any real business need, so a filing pattern that would draw scrutiny in Beijing sails through in Delhi.

It is an admitted fact that both the nations’ policy can’t be set into a same pedestal and need to import each other’s poly but an underlying idea that an examiner who can ask a suspicious applicant to show a genuine business reason for a filing, before registration rather than after, catches the problem at a fraction of the cost of a rectification petition three years later. The Registry already holds the filing data needed to flag applicants who repeatedly register marks resembling existing brands, or who hold large portfolios with no matching commercial activity. Using that data at the examination stage, and giving opponents a faster, more clearly defined route to intervene before a bad-faith mark matures into a registered right.

1. https://www.livelaw.in/articles/protecting-well-known-international-trademarks-india-judicial-approach-transborder-reputation-and-squatting-289462 ↑

2. https://www.livelawbiz.com/trademark/delhi-high-court-grants-interim-injunction-in-beauty-of-joseon-trade-dress-dispute-directs-amazon-to-delist-infringing-urls-540413 ↑

3. Avijit Mondal, Jharasri Paikaray and Pinaki Sankar Chatterjee, ‘Intelligent Legal and Technical Strategies to Mitigate Cybersquatting: Bridging Global Frameworks and Indian Contexts’ (2025) 53 IEEE Systems and Information Dynamics 913. ↑

4. B Layasri and Cruz Joshna, ‘Legal Ambiguities in Addressing Ghost Trademarks: A Comparative Analysis on Indian Trademark Law and International Jurisdictions’ (2025) 7 International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research. ↑

5. https://www.livelaw.in/high-court/delhi-high-court/delhi-high-court-trade-mark-squatting-bad-faith-227734 ↑

6. https://www.afdip.com/insights/Articles/TRADEMARK/2026/0721/2303.html ↑

7. https://ipindia.gov.in/storage/uploads/media/English_Annual_Report_2024-25.pdf ↑