A Practical Guide to Intellectual Property for Architects, Planners and Engineers

 This book began with an uncomfortable observation. Across the design studios, planning offices and engineering consultancies of India there is an enormous quantity of original creative work, and almost none of it is protected. A façade panel is detailed, prototyped, mocked up on site and installed. A modular street-vending kiosk is designed for a municipal corporation, fabricated in a workshop and rolled out across forty locations. A water-harvesting chamber is redesigned so that it can be cast in two pieces instead of four. Each of these is, in the ordinary statutory sense, a design  a new shape or configuration applied to an article by an industrial process, judged solely by the eye. Each is capable of registration. Almost none of them are registered. 

The reason is rarely indifference. In our teaching and in our professional practice we have found that architects, planners and engineers are intensely protective of their work in an emotional sense and entirely unprotective of it in a legal sense. They will argue for hours about whether a competitor copied a roofline. They will not spend one thousand rupees and two afternoons filing the form that would have made the argument winnable. The gap is not one of will. It is a gap of vocabulary, of procedure, and of confidence.

This book is written to close that gap. It is not a treatise on intellectual property law, and it is not written for lawyers. It is written for the professional who has a drawing on the screen and a question in the back of the mind: is there anything here worth protecting, and if so, what do I actually do on Monday morning? Every chapter is organised around that question. Where the law matters, we state it plainly and cite the statute or the official portal. Where the law is unsettled, we say so rather than pretending to a certainty the field does not possess. Where the practical answer differs from the theoretical answer — and in intellectual property it very often does  we give the practical answer first.

Three commitments shape the text. The first is that design protection belongs inside the design process, not after it. A registration strategy invented at the end of a project is usually a strategy for discovering that novelty was destroyed eighteen months earlier by a competition entry. The second is that the unit of protection is the article, not the building, the plan or the scheme. This single idea, developed at length in Chapters 5 and 6, resolves most of the confusion that surrounds design rights in the built-environment professions. The third is that intellectual property is a portfolio discipline. One registration is a curiosity; a family of related registrations, renewed on schedule and mapped to a manufacturing partner, is an asset that appears on a balance sheet.

The evidence base for the book is drawn from three sources. The first is the scholarly literature on intellectual property in India, assembled here as a corpus of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters published between 2016 and 2026 and analysed in Chapter 1. The second is the body of official Indian material  the statutes, the rules, the forms, the fee schedules, the annual reports of the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, and the policy documents of the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade. The third is our own experience of teaching design and planning students, supervising theses that produced registrable outputs, and watching those outputs go unprotected.

A word on what this book is not. It is not legal advice, and nothing in it creates a professional relationship between the authors and the reader. Intellectual property decisions carry commercial consequences, and a you should consult a registered patent or design agentefore filing in any matter of significance. Statutory provisions, fee schedules and procedural timelines change; every figure quoted here should be verified against the current text on the official portal before it is relied upon. We have given the portal addresses throughout precisely so that the reader can perform that check.

We hope the book is useful in three settings: on the desk of a practising architect, planner or engineer; in the hands of a research scholar preparing to publish work that may also be registrable; and in the classroom, where a generation of students is still being taught to design without being taught that a design is property.

Book Details

Book Title: A Practical Guide to Intellectual Property for Architects, Planners and Engineers

Authors: EduPub, New Delhi
Publisher: Dr Prashanti Rao & Shashikant Nishant Sharma
Year of Publication: 2026
ISBN: 978-93-92585-05-0

DOI: Under process

Link to Buy Print Book: will be updated soon.