Dispute arising from copyright infringement constitutes a "commercial dispute" requiring adjudication by a designated Commercial Court.

The plaintiff (respondent) filed a regular declaratory suit in the City Civil Court at Calcutta, alleging that the defendants (appellants) published a Chemistry book containing two chapters authored by him without permission or attribution

The Trial Court granted an ex parte ad interim injunction restraining the defendants from publishing the book in its entirety

The defendants appealed, contending that the suit constitutes a "commercial dispute" under the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, and was improperly filed as a regular civil suit.

They further argued the Trial Court failed to provide mandatory reasons for dispensing with prior notice to the defendants under Order XXXIX Rule 3 of the CPC

Section 2(1)(c)(xvii) of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, which defines "commercial dispute" to include disputes arising out of intellectual property rights such as copyright

Sections 55 and 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957, to establish the foundational nature of the plaintiff's claim

Proviso to Order XXXIX Rule 3 of the Code of Civil Procedure (CPC), which mandates recording reasons for the opinion that the object of granting an injunction would be defeated by delay

Precedents of Time City Infrastructure and Housing Limited vs. State of U.P. (2025) and Union of India vs. Essen Mining & Industries Limited (2005) regarding the imperative nature of recording reasons for ex parte orders

The High Court found that the "plinth" of the plaintiff’s cause of action was his alleged copyright in the manuscript, placing the matter squarely under the definition of a commercial dispute

Since the suit valuation exceeded the "specified value," it should have been instituted in a Commercial Court with the accompanying procedural rigors, such as Section 12A compliance

The Court observed that while the City Civil Court assigns commercial matters to specific Benches, this suit was erroneously entertained as an ordinary civil suit, resulting in a lack of jurisdiction

The Court noted that the Trial Judge merely paid "lip-service" to the tests for injunction without citing specific materials or explaining why notice should be dispensed with under the proviso to Order XXXIX Rule 3

This procedural lapse and the jurisdictional error rendered the ad interim order unsustainable

The appeal was allowed, and the order dated November 24, 2025, passed by the Tenth Bench, City Civil Court at Calcutta, was set aside.