A rice mill owner in Pudukottai has just found out that criminal copyright cases do not fall away simply because the person who filed the complaint might not have been the copyright owner himself. In Veerasekar v. State of Tamil Nadu and Another, Justice R. Vijayakumar of the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court dismissed a petition seeking to quash a charge sheet framed under Section 51(b)(i) read with Section 63(a) of the Copyright Act, 1957. The order, running through four separate arguments raised by the accused, offers a useful walk through several doctrines that rarely get tested together in one case, locus standi in criminal law, the difference between deceptive similarity and substantial similarity, and the narrow window within which a High Court will interfere with a pending prosecution.
The Complaint That Led To Prosecution
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The dispute traces back to an artistic work titled Sree Manchukonda Nawaab, registered with the Registrar of Copyrights in 2022 in the name of Chakravarthy Manchukonda, the Managing Director of Manchukonda Agrotech Private Limited, a company selling rice and rice products. In January 2025 a sales representative of the company lodged a complaint before the Intellectual Property Right Enforcement Cell in Trichy, alleging that the petitioner had copied the same logo and was passing off his own rice as the company’s Nawaab brand. Police registered an FIR the same day and searched the rice mill owned by the petitioner.
The search turned up rice bags bearing a logo reading Manchukonda Nawab being sold alongside the petitioner’s own rice, along with 1300 kilograms of rice packed in 26 kilogram bags and 100 empty bags carrying the same logo, all of which were seized. The charge sheet that followed alleged that the logo used by the petitioner was identical to the registered copyright and that this had caused financial loss and reputational damage to Manchukonda Agrotech. The petitioner approached the High Court under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the provision that now carries the inherent powers once found in Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, seeking to quash the charge sheet entirely.
Four Arguments, One Common Thread
Counsel for the petitioner raised four distinct grounds. The first was that the complaint lacked locus standi, since the copyright was registered in the individual name of Chakravarthy Manchukonda while the complaint was lodged by a sales representative of his company, with no proof that the company had ever been licensed to use the copyright. The second relied on a Bombay High Court, Nagpur Bench decision holding that selling counterfeit goods with printed labels does not, by itself, amount to copyright infringement. The third argued that deceptive similarity is a trademark concept with no place in copyright law, so an allegation that the logos looked alike could not sustain a criminal copyright charge. The fourth contended that Section 63 requires proof that the infringement was committed knowingly, and since neither the FIR nor the charge sheet contained any specific averment about the petitioner’s knowledge, the prosecution could not stand.
Running beneath all four arguments was a single strategy, treating the quashing petition as an opportunity to relitigate the substance of the case before trial even began. The Court’s response to each argument shows why that strategy did not work here.
Why Locus Standi Did Not Help The Petitioner
On the locus standi question, the Court turned to two Supreme Court decisions that have shaped how Indian criminal law treats the identity of a complainant. In A.R. Antulay v. Ramdas Sriniwas Nayak, the Supreme Court held that anyone can set the criminal law in motion unless the statute creating the offence says otherwise, and that locus standi is a concept foreign to criminal jurisprudence except where a statute expressly limits who may complain. In Manohar Lal v. Vinesh Anand, the Supreme Court reinforced the same point, observing that pursuing an offender serves a social need independent of who happens to bring the complaint forward.
Applying these principles, the Court found nothing in the Copyright Act that restricts who may lodge a complaint or designates a specific authority for that purpose. Whether Chakravarthy Manchukonda had actually licensed the company to use his copyright, the Court held, was an internal matter between the individual copyright owner and his own company, and the petitioner, being a complete stranger to that relationship, could not use any ambiguity in it to his advantage. This reasoning tracks a broader principle running through Indian criminal procedure, that a defendant facing a serious charge cannot escape prosecution merely by questioning the standing of whoever happened to report the offence, so long as the offence itself is properly disclosed.
Substantial Similarity, Not Deceptive Similarity
The petitioner’s argument that deceptive similarity belongs only to trademark law found a more nuanced response. The Court agreed with the underlying premise, deceptive similarity as a legal test genuinely is a trademark concept, but pointed out that copyright law has its own parallel doctrine that does the same work, the test of substantial similarity. Rather than treat the petitioner’s semantic objection as fatal, the Court examined the actual allegations and found that the charge sheet described the two logos as identical in design, colour, font, background, and even the material of the bags themselves, well beyond anything a mere deceptive similarity analysis would require.
To support this, the Court relied on the Supreme Court’s classic formulation in R.G. Anand v. Delux Films, which holds that copyright protects the expression of an idea rather than the idea itself, and that infringement turns on whether an ordinary viewer, after seeing both works, would form the unmistakable impression that the later work copies the earlier one. Where the alleged copying goes beyond mere similarity into what looks like a complete and literal reproduction, the Court noted, the case moves well past the kind of borderline resemblance that the deceptive similarity versus substantial similarity debate is really meant to address. Given that the petitioner never disputed the near total identity between the two logos, this argument could not carry the appeal.
The Narrow Window For Quashing A Charge Sheet
The mens rea argument ran into a different but related obstacle, the limited role a High Court plays when asked to quash a charge sheet before trial. The Court invoked the four propositions laid down by the Supreme Court in R. Kalyani v. Janak C. Mehta, which caution that inherent jurisdiction to quash a criminal proceeding should be exercised sparingly, that a court should ordinarily avoid looking at defence material at this stage, and that where the FIR discloses commission of an offence on its face, the court cannot go further and hold that mens rea or actus reus is absent, since the presence or absence of a guilty mind is precisely the kind of question trial evidence exists to answer.
Applying this framework, the Court observed that the charge sheet already alleged the petitioner had copied the registered logo in its entirety and that the petitioner had not claimed ignorance of the registration at any stage. Whether he genuinely knew about the copyright and intended to infringe it remained a question of fact suited to trial, not to a quashing petition, and the Court declined to short circuit that process. The State’s counsel had made a related point during argument, that whether the petitioner possessed the requisite knowledge lies within his own special awareness, making it appropriate for him to establish the absence of that knowledge as a matter of defence rather than expecting the prosecution to negate it in advance at the charge sheet stage.
Why This Matters For Criminal Copyright Enforcement
Section 63 of the Copyright Act treats infringement as a criminal offence carrying a minimum sentence of six months, extending up to three years, along with a fine, and the Supreme Court has already confirmed in Knit Pro International v. State of NCT of Delhi that this offence is cognisable and non bailable, meaning police can register an FIR and file a charge sheet without needing a magistrate’s prior sanction. Tamil Nadu’s decision to route this case through a specialised Intellectual Property Right Enforcement Cell reflects a broader institutional trend of treating counterfeit trade dress and packaging disputes as a law enforcement priority rather than leaving them entirely to civil litigation between rights holders.
This order is a reminder that once a specialised police unit has investigated, seized counterfeit stock, and filed a charge sheet supported by a registered copyright, an accused cannot expect a High Court to dismantle that case at the threshold through technical arguments about who complained or what label applies to the similarity test. Genuine defences on knowledge, licensing, or authorisation remain fully open at trial, and the Court took care to say so expressly, directing the trial court to decide the case on its own merits without being influenced by any of its own observations.
Also Read: Zee Entertainment v. BSNL: Madras High Court Permits Withdrawal of Copyright Suit
Conclusion
Copyright law rightly resists letting a defendant with no personal knowledge of the underlying licensing arrangement between a registered owner and his own company use that arrangement as a shield, and the substantial similarity finding here was hardly a close call given a logo that matched down to the colour and font. The mens rea argument was always going to struggle against the settled and sensible principle that a charge sheet disclosing a complete offence cannot be dismantled by asking a court to assume the best about the accused’s state of mind before any evidence has been led. What this case really shows is the value of specialised enforcement cells like IPREC in giving criminal copyright provisions the teeth Parliament intended them to have, while the trial court still carries the real responsibility of weighing whether the petitioner can, in fact, explain away 1300 kilograms of rice sold under a copied label.
