Copyright Protection of Fashion Designs: Gaps and Challenges Under National Law

1. Abstract

Fashion design occupies a precarious position within most national copyright frameworks. Although fashion designs embody significant artistic expression, originality, and creative labor, the majority of jurisdictions either exclude them entirely from copyright protection or impose conditions so restrictive that meaningful protection is rarely achieved. This article examines the doctrinal foundations and legislative frameworks governing copyright protection of fashion designs, with a focus on the persistent gaps and practical challenges that leave designers—particularly those in the Global South—without adequate legal recourse. Through a comparative analysis of legal regimes in the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Bangladesh, the article identifies critical inconsistencies in how national laws distinguish between functional and expressive elements of fashion, evaluate originality, and delimit the scope of protection. It further explores how the rise of fast fashion and digital reproduction has intensified the need for robust intellectual property protection while simultaneously exposing the inadequacy of existing frameworks. The article argues that current copyright laws, shaped by outdated assumptions about the utility of clothing, fail to reflect the evolving cultural and economic significance of fashion design. It concludes with recommendations for legislative reform and international harmonization to extend meaningful protection to fashion designers worldwide, with particular attention to Bangladesh’s recently enacted Copyright Act 2023.

Keywords: Fashion Design; Copyright Law; Intellectual Property; Useful Article Doctrine; Originality; Fast Fashion; Design Protection; Bangladesh Copyright Act 2023; Traditional Knowledge; National Law.

2. Introduction

Fashion is among the most economically significant creative industries in the world. The global fashion industry generates revenues exceeding two trillion US dollars annually, employing hundreds of millions of workers across design, manufacturing, retail, and supply chains.[1] Yet, despite the considerable creative labor embedded in fashion design, most national copyright systems provide designers with limited or no protection against copying. This legal vacuum has profound consequences: it incentivizes imitation, undermines the economic sustainability of original designers, and distorts market competition in ways that disproportionately harm smaller, independent creators.

The challenge of protecting fashion under copyright stems primarily from the doctrinal treatment of clothing as a “useful article.” In most common law and civil law systems, copyright protection is reserved for works of pure artistic expression and is explicitly excluded from, or severely limited in its application to, objects that serve a functional purpose. Since clothing, by definition, serves the utilitarian function of covering the body, fashion designs are routinely classified as industrial or applied art, placing them outside the ordinary scope of copyright protection. While some jurisdictions have developed specialized design protection regimes as alternatives, these too are frequently inadequate in scope, duration, and accessibility.

The proliferation of fast fashion has dramatically amplified these concerns. Retailers and manufacturers can now reproduce and distribute copies of original designs within weeks of their debut, reaching global markets before the original designer has recouped the costs of creation. Digital technologies, including three-dimensional printing and artificial intelligence-assisted pattern generation, have further reduced the barriers to copying. In this environment, legal frameworks built on twentieth-century assumptions about manufacture and distribution are increasingly ill-equipped to protect the rights of designers. This article undertakes a comparative legal analysis to identify where national laws fall short and to consider what reforms might provide more effective and equitable protection.

3. Literature Review

3.1 Intellectual Property Scholarship on Fashion

Academic scholarship on the intellectual property dimensions of fashion design has grown considerably since the early 2000s. Early contributions by Raustiala and Sprigman argued, counterintuitively, that the absence of copyright protection in fashion may stimulate rather than suppress innovation by enabling the rapid diffusion of trends—a phenomenon they termed the “piracy paradox.”[2] Their analysis, grounded in the economics of fashion cycles, remains influential but has been challenged by scholars who contend that it prioritizes industry-level trend dynamics over the interests of individual designers whose specific creative works are appropriated without compensation.

Subsequent scholarship has focused on the doctrinal barriers to copyright protection. Scafidi examined how the useful article doctrine in United States law operates as a structural exclusion of fashion from copyright, while noting that trade dress and unfair competition law offer partial, if inconsistent, alternatives.[3] In the European context, Derclaye analyzed how the “cumulation” approach in EU member states allows fashion designs to simultaneously attract copyright and design right protection, though the conditions for copyright eligibility vary significantly between national courts.[4]

3.2 Policy and Legislative Debates

Legislative debates in the United States have periodically produced proposals to extend copyright-like protection to fashion designs. The Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (IDPPPA), introduced in the US Senate in 2011, sought to create a three-year protection period for fashion designs meeting specified originality criteria.[5] The bill ultimately failed to advance, reflecting strong opposition from the fast fashion industry and persistent doctrinal skepticism within Congress. Commentators noted that the proposed standard of “substantially identical” copying, while pragmatically motivated, introduced its own interpretive difficulties.

In developing countries, the scholarly literature is thinner but growing. Research on South and Southeast Asian fashion industries has highlighted how the absence of adequate IP infrastructure leaves artisanal and craft-based fashion producers particularly vulnerable to appropriation by larger international retailers.[6] The intersection of cultural heritage, traditional textile design, and modern fashion IP represents a distinct challenge that mainstream intellectual property doctrine has yet to adequately address.

3.3 Gaps in Existing Literature

While existing scholarship has extensively mapped the doctrinal landscape in developed jurisdictions, comparative analyses that incorporate the legal frameworks of developing countries remain underdeveloped. There is also limited interdisciplinary engagement between legal analysis and the lived experiences of fashion designers, particularly those in the informal and artisanal sectors. This article seeks to address these gaps by combining doctrinal analysis with a comparative perspective that includes jurisdictions in South Asia, with particular attention to recent legislative developments in Bangladesh.

4. Conceptual Framework: Fashion as Creative Expression

4.1 The Artistic Nature of Fashion Design

Fashion design encompasses a broad range of creative decisions: the selection of colors and fabrics, the arrangement of decorative elements, the construction of silhouettes, the application of embroidery, printing or weaving patterns, and the overarching aesthetic vision that renders a garment distinctive. These creative choices are no less expressive than the brushstrokes of a painting or the composition of a musical work. Prominent fashion designers, from Coco Chanel to Alexander McQueen, have been widely recognized as artists whose work carries cultural and aesthetic significance well beyond mere utility.

The artistic nature of fashion is further evidenced by its institutional recognition. Major museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, house permanent collections of fashion design and regularly mount major fashion exhibitions. Fashion weeks in Paris, Milan, London, and New York are recognized as events of global cultural significance. Academic programs in fashion design operate alongside fine arts departments in leading universities. Yet the law has been slow to translate this cultural recognition into enforceable legal rights.

4.2 The Utility Problem: Functionality versus Expression

The central doctrinal tension in fashion copyright law is the distinction between functional and expressive elements. Copyright protects expression; it does not protect functionality. This principle, which traces to the merger doctrine and the idea-expression dichotomy, has been applied to fashion in ways that frequently conflate the physical utility of clothing with the artistic expression embedded in its design. A striped pattern on a jacket, an embroidered motif on a dress, or an unusual draping technique may be clearly separable from the utilitarian function of covering the wearer’s body, yet courts and legislators have often been reluctant to extend protection to such elements.

The United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Star Athletica, LLC v. Varsity Brands, Inc. (2017) attempted to clarify this distinction by establishing a two-part test for the separability of artistic elements from useful articles.[7] The Court held that a feature of the design of a useful article is eligible for copyright protection if it can be perceived as a two- or three-dimensional work of art separate from the useful article, and would qualify as a protectable pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work on its own if imagined independently. While Star Athletica extended protection to surface decorations on garments, it did not resolve questions concerning three-dimensional design elements such as distinctive cuts, silhouettes, and draping, leaving substantial areas of legal uncertainty.

5. National Legal Frameworks: A Comparative Analysis

5.1 United States

In the United States, fashion designs receive only limited copyright protection under the Copyright Act of 1976. The Act protects “pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works,” but explicitly excludes from protection the “mechanical or utilitarian aspects” of useful articles.[8] Clothing, as a useful article, falls outside the scope of standard copyright protection unless its design features can be conceptually or physically separated from their utilitarian function. In practice, this means that the overall design of a garment—including its cut, shape, and three-dimensional structure—is not protected by copyright. Only elements that are “separable” from the utilitarian object, such as surface prints or attached ornamental features, may qualify for protection.

In the absence of copyright protection, United States designers rely on a patchwork of alternative legal tools. Trade dress protection under the Lanham Act can protect the distinctive appearance of a product if it has acquired secondary meaning and is non-functional, but this standard is difficult to satisfy and typically requires a substantial history of market presence.[9] Design patents offer protection for new, original, and ornamental designs for articles of manufacture, but the application process is costly and time-consuming, and protection subsists for only fifteen years from the date of grant. The practical consequence is that most fashion designs—particularly those by newer or smaller designers—receive no meaningful legal protection in the United States.

5.2 European Union

The European Union presents a considerably more favorable legal environment for fashion designers, principally through the Community Design Regulation (Regulation 6/2002/EC) and the Design Directive (98/71/EC).[10] The Community Design system grants unregistered design right protection for a period of three years from the date of first disclosure, and registered design protection for up to twenty-five years, renewable in five-year increments. Importantly, EU design law does not exclude fashion from protection on grounds of functionality, making it considerably more accessible to fashion designers than its United States counterpart.

The relationship between copyright and design right in the EU is governed by the principle of cumulation: member states may allow fashion designs that meet the threshold of originality to receive simultaneous protection under copyright and design right. However, the standard for copyright eligibility varies across member states. In France, the doctrine of “unité de l’art” treats all creative works as equally eligible for copyright regardless of their utilitarian character, offering broad protection to fashion designs. In contrast, German law historically required a higher level of artistic achievement for applied art to qualify for copyright, though the Federal Court of Justice relaxed this standard in its Geburtstagszug decision of 2013.[11] The Court of Justice of the European Union further harmonized the position in Cofemel v. G-Star Raw (2019), confirming that fashion designs satisfying the autonomous EU originality standard are entitled to copyright protection throughout the Union.[12]

5.3 United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, fashion designs are governed by a complex interaction of copyright, registered design, unregistered design right, and trade mark law. The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) excludes from copyright protection designs that are primarily functional, though surface ornamentation on articles may qualify as an artistic work.[13] Unregistered design right under the CDPA protects the shape and configuration of original designs for up to ten years from first marketing, but does not extend to two-dimensional designs such as surface patterns, which may alternatively attract protection as artistic works under copyright law.

Following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, the UK has retained its own registered design system, which continues to offer protection aligned with, though no longer legally identical to, EU design law. UK courts have developed a nuanced body of case law on the requirements for design originality. The complexity of the overlapping regimes creates uncertainty for designers and increases the practical and financial costs of asserting and defending rights, particularly for small and independent designers without dedicated legal support.

5.4 Bangladesh and South Asia

Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest garment exporter by volume, yet its domestic designers and artisans operate with minimal legal protection for their creative works. Until recently, the primary legislative instrument was the Copyright Act 2000, which protected original literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic works and included within the definition of artistic works paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, and works of artistic craftsmanship.[14] However, that Act did not expressly address fashion design, and the courts did not develop a body of jurisprudence clarifying whether fashion designs could qualify as works of artistic craftsmanship.

A significant legislative development occurred with the enactment of the Copyright Act 2023, which represents the most comprehensive reform of Bangladesh’s copyright law in over two decades.[15] The new Act modernizes the definition of protected works, strengthens enforcement mechanisms, and introduces provisions relevant to digital reproduction and online infringement. However, the Act continues to rely on general categories of artistic and applied art works without expressly incorporating fashion design as a distinct protected category. The absence of explicit recognition leaves considerable interpretive uncertainty regarding the scope of protection available to fashion designers under the new framework.

The Patents and Designs Act 1911, which remains operative in Bangladesh as amended, provides registration-based protection for industrial designs, including features of shape, configuration, pattern, or ornament applied to articles by an industrial process.[16] This Act was designed primarily for industrial products rather than fashion, and its registration requirements—including prior novelty and a formal application process—create significant barriers for designers working in artisanal or small-scale fashion contexts. Enforcement capacity is limited, and awareness of available intellectual property rights among designers is low, particularly in regions outside Dhaka.

The particular vulnerability of Bangladesh’s traditional textile heritage to uncompensated appropriation deserves specific attention. The jamdani muslin weave, recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, represents centuries of collective creative development by weavers in Narayanganj district.[17] Despite this recognition, jamdani designs remain outside copyright protection because they lack a single identifiable author and do not satisfy the fixation and originality requirements of copyright law as currently framed. International fashion brands have on several documented occasions reproduced jamdani-inspired patterns in mass-produced garments without attribution or compensation to the originating communities. A dedicated geographical indication or sui generis protection mechanism, analogous to those developed for other traditional cultural expressions in the region, could provide more appropriate protection.

India presents a somewhat more developed framework under the Designs Act 2000, which offers protection for new or original designs applied to articles.[18] The Copyright Act 1957 additionally protects artistic works, and Indian courts have addressed the relationship between copyright and design right in decisions concerning the “industrial application” threshold. Pakistan similarly relies on the Registered Designs Ordinance and Copyright Ordinance, with comparable limitations in enforcement and designer awareness. Across South Asia, the inadequacy of legal protection for traditional and artisanal fashion represents a critical gap, as distinctive regional textile traditions—including jamdani weaving, kantha embroidery, block printing, and nakshi kantha—remain vulnerable to uncompensated appropriation by domestic and international actors alike.

6. Key Gaps and Challenges in National Copyright Frameworks

6.1 The Useful Article Doctrine and Its Limits

The useful article doctrine, as applied to fashion, reflects a conceptual framework that is increasingly difficult to justify. The doctrine assumes a clean binary between artistic and functional objects. Yet fashion design occupies a space in which aesthetic and functional purposes coexist: a coat is designed to provide warmth, but it may simultaneously be designed to express identity, signal social status, or communicate aesthetic values. The insistence on separating these purposes treats clothing as categorically less worthy of legal protection than, for example, a painting designed to hang on a wall, despite the fact that both are the product of skilled creative labor.

Even following Star Athletica, significant gaps remain in United States law. The decision clarified that surface decorations may be separable and thus protectable, but left unresolved whether three-dimensional design elements such as distinctive pleating, draping, or sculptural construction can satisfy the separability test. Lower courts have reached inconsistent conclusions on these questions, producing a fragmented body of case law that provides unreliable guidance to designers and their legal advisors. The doctrine continues to function as a near-categorical exclusion of fashion from copyright protection in the United States.

6.2 The Originality Threshold

Where copyright protection is available to fashion designs, the originality requirement presents a further challenge. Most legal systems require that a work exhibit some minimum degree of creative expression to qualify for copyright. In United States law, the standard established by Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (1991) requires a “modicum of creativity” beyond mere compilation or routine execution.[19] For fashion design, which often involves combining familiar elements—draping techniques, fabric types, traditional motifs—in novel ways, demonstrating the requisite creativity without being able to claim protection in any individual element creates a significant doctrinal difficulty.

In EU law, the Court of Justice has affirmed an “author’s own intellectual creation” standard derived from the Infopaq decision, and has applied it to design works in Cofemel v. G-Star Raw (2019).[12] The Cofemel ruling is significant because it confirmed that fashion designs meeting the originality standard are entitled to copyright protection across EU member states, overriding national practices that imposed a higher threshold for applied art. Nevertheless, national courts retain discretion in how they assess originality in specific cases, and the practical outcome of Cofemel has varied across member states.

6.3 Duration and Scope of Protection

Even where copyright protection exists, its duration and scope may be poorly calibrated to the economic realities of the fashion industry. Copyright protection, which typically subsists for the life of the author plus seventy years, may substantially exceed what is economically meaningful in fashion, where the commercial window for a design is often measured in months or even weeks. Design rights, which operate on shorter timescales of three to twenty-five years, may be more proportionate to fashion’s commercial lifecycle, but their registration requirements and associated fees create barriers to access for individual designers and small enterprises.

The scope of protection is equally problematic. Copyright protection for fashion, where it exists, typically covers only exact or near-exact reproduction and does not prohibit the appropriation of a design’s overall aesthetic, silhouette, or compositional approach. In an industry in which copying frequently takes the form of “inspired by” reproductions that replicate the overall feel of a design without exactly duplicating any protected element, this limited scope substantially diminishes the practical value of protection.

6.4 Fast Fashion and Digital Copying

The business model of fast fashion is fundamentally predicated on the rapid reproduction of trend-driven designs. Major fast fashion retailers operate design teams whose function is explicitly to monitor high fashion and emerging designer output and replicate successful designs at lower price points and with greater speed to market. This model has been extensively documented and widely criticized, yet it operates largely within the letter of current law in jurisdictions where fashion design is unprotected or protected only with respect to elements that fast fashion operators can readily design around.

Digital technologies have introduced new dimensions to this challenge. Online platforms allow images of new designs to be disseminated globally within hours of their creation, reducing the lead time that independent designers previously relied on as a practical substitute for formal legal protection. Three-dimensional printing and digital fabrication technologies are beginning to enable the reproduction of three-dimensional design elements as well as surface patterns. Artificial intelligence-powered design tools can analyze a designer’s aesthetic and generate derivative works that are difficult to challenge under current copyright doctrine. The cumulative effect of these technological developments is to make the inadequacy of legal protection more economically consequential than at any previous point.

6.5 Traditional and Artisanal Fashion: A Distinct Challenge

A distinctive challenge arises in relation to traditional and artisanal fashion design, which is the dominant mode of fashion creation in many parts of South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. Traditional textile patterns, embroidery techniques, and weaving designs that have been developed and transmitted within communities over generations do not fit neatly within a copyright framework predicated on individual authorship and a fixed creation date. The requirements of individual authorship and originality as novelty present particular difficulties for communally developed designs.

In Bangladesh, designs such as the jamdani muslin weave—recognized by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage—represent centuries of collective creative development yet fall outside copyright protection because they lack a single identifiable author. International frameworks for the protection of traditional knowledge and genetic resources, developed under the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee, have been under negotiation for over two decades without reaching a binding agreement.[20] In the meantime, the appropriation of traditional designs by international fashion brands without attribution or compensation to originating communities continues largely unchecked.

7. International Dimension: Harmonization and Its Limits

7.1 TRIPS and the Minimum Standards Approach

The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), administered by the World Trade Organization, establishes minimum standards for intellectual property protection among member states.[21] With respect to industrial designs, Article 25 of TRIPS requires members to provide protection for independently created designs that are new or original. However, TRIPS does not specify the form or duration of protection, leaving substantial discretion to national legislatures. Developing countries have used this flexibility to maintain limited and often weak design protection regimes, while developed countries have used it to preserve their own diverse approaches to the copyright-design right relationship.

The minimum standards approach embedded in TRIPS is poorly suited to addressing the specific challenges of fashion design protection. The Agreement was negotiated in the 1990s, before the advent of fast fashion as a dominant retail model and before digital technologies had transformed the economics of design reproduction. Its provisions do not address the specific vulnerability of fashion design to systematic copying, do not require automatic unregistered design protection, and do not create any mechanism for protecting traditional or communal designs.

7.2 Prospects for Harmonization

The significant divergence between national approaches to fashion design protection creates barriers to international enforcement and generates uncertainty for designers who operate in multiple markets. A designer whose work is protected under French copyright law may find that the same work receives no equivalent protection in the United States, and that the legal tools available in Bangladesh provide no practical recourse against copying by manufacturers in another jurisdiction. The absence of a harmonized international standard means that designers must navigate multiple distinct legal regimes—a task that is prohibitively expensive for most individual designers and small design firms.

Prospects for meaningful harmonization in the near term are constrained. The interests of fashion-importing and fast-fashion-dependent economies in maintaining low barriers to design reproduction conflict directly with the interests of design-producing economies and individual designers in stronger protection. Nonetheless, targeted initiatives—such as establishing a minimum standard of unregistered design right protection modeled on the EU approach, or developing a WIPO instrument specifically addressing fashion design and traditional textiles—could be pursued without requiring wholesale reform of existing international IP law.

8. Conclusion and Recommendations

The analysis presented in this article reveals a consistent pattern across national copyright frameworks: fashion design, despite its clear artistic character and its enormous economic and cultural significance, receives inadequate and inconsistent legal protection in most jurisdictions. The useful article doctrine, the originality requirement, the limitations of registration-based design right systems, and the challenge posed by fast fashion collectively leave designers exposed to a form of systematic copying that would be clearly actionable were the same works expressed in other creative media.

The situation is particularly acute for designers in developing countries, including Bangladesh, where weak enforcement infrastructure, limited designer awareness of intellectual property rights, and the absence of dedicated fashion design protection measures compound the existing doctrinal gaps. The traditional and artisanal dimension of South Asian fashion further reveals the inadequacy of an intellectual property framework built on individualist and market-oriented assumptions. Bangladesh’s enactment of the Copyright Act 2023 represents a meaningful step toward legislative modernization, but further reform is needed to address the specific vulnerabilities of the fashion design sector.

On the basis of this analysis, the article advances the following recommendations:

• National legislatures should extend short-term, automatic (unregistered) design protection to fashion designs meeting a minimum originality standard. The EU unregistered Community design right, providing three years of automatic protection from first disclosure, offers a workable model that could be adapted for adoption in other jurisdictions, including Bangladesh.

• The useful article doctrine in United States law should be reconsidered to acknowledge that three-dimensional design elements of fashion—including distinctive silhouettes, draping, and structural construction—may be conceptually separable from the utilitarian function of clothing, particularly in light of the evolving post-Star Athletica jurisprudence.

• Bangladesh should supplement the Copyright Act 2023 with regulations or guidelines that expressly address the eligibility of fashion designs and works of applied art for copyright protection, and should reform the Patents and Designs Act 1911 to introduce a simplified, low-cost registration process accessible to artisanal and small-scale designers.

• Bangladesh should pursue the registration of jamdani and other traditional textile designs as geographical indications under the Geographical Indication of Goods (Registration and Protection) Act 2013, and should advocate within WIPO for an expedited binding instrument on the protection of traditional cultural expressions.

• International efforts under WIPO to develop binding protections for traditional cultural expressions and traditional knowledge should be accelerated, with specific attention to traditional textile designs and artisanal fashion practices in developing countries.

• Fashion industry stakeholders, including designers’ associations and trade bodies, should develop collective licensing and attribution frameworks as a complement to formal legal protection, drawing on analogous models from the music and visual arts sectors.

In sum, copyright protection of fashion designs is not merely an arcane doctrinal question. It is a matter of economic justice for creative workers, of cultural preservation for communities whose design traditions are being appropriated, and of legal coherence in a world where the law’s treatment of fashion increasingly diverges from the cultural and artistic significance that fashion commands. Meaningful and targeted reform is both necessary and practically achievable.

9. Reference(S):

[1] McKinsey & Company, The State of Fashion 2024 (McKinsey Global Institute 2024).

[2] Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman, ‘The Piracy Paradox: Innovation and Intellectual Property in Fashion Design’ (2006) 92 Virginia Law Review 1687.

[3] Susan Scafidi, ‘Intellectual Property and Fashion Design’ in Peter K Yu (ed), Intellectual Property and Information Wealth (Greenwood Press 2007).

[4] Estelle Derclaye, ‘Should Fashion Designs Be Protected by Copyright?’ in Estelle Derclaye (ed), Research Handbook on the Future of EU Copyright (Edward Elgar 2009).

[5] Innovative Design Protection and Piracy Prevention Act (IDPPPA), S 3728, 111th Congress (2010).

[6] Madhavi Sunder, From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice (Yale University Press 2012).

[7] Star Athletica, LLC v Varsity Brands, Inc, 580 US 405 (2017).

[8] Copyright Act of 1976, 17 USC § 101.

[9] Two Pesos, Inc v Taco Cabana, Inc, 505 US 763 (1992).

[10] Council Regulation (EC) 6/2002 on Community Designs [2002] OJ L3/1; Directive 98/71/EC on the Legal Protection of Designs [1998] OJ L289/28.

[11] Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice, Germany), Geburtstagszug, I ZR 143/12 (13 November 2013).

[12] Case C-683/17 Cofemel – Soc. de Vestuario SA v G-Star Raw CV [2019] ECLI:EU:C:2019:721.

[13] Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (UK), ss 51–52.

[14] Copyright Act 2000 (Bangladesh), s 2(c) (repealed and replaced by the Copyright Act 2023).

[15] Copyright Act 2023 (Bangladesh).

[16] Patents and Designs Act 1911 (Bangladesh), as amended.

[17] UNESCO, ‘Decision of the Intergovernmental Committee: 8.COM 8.17’ (UNESCO 2013) (inscribing jamdani weaving on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity).

[18] Designs Act 2000 (India), s 2(d).

[19] Feist Publications Inc v Rural Telephone Service Co Inc, 499 US 340 (1991).

[20] WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, WIPO Doc IGC/47/3 (2024).

[21] Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), Annex 1C to the Marrakesh Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization, 1869 UNTS 299 (1994), art 25.