Mother Teresa's famous blue-rimmed white cotton sari has officially become a trademarked symbol.
It's the first time a religious uniform has ever been claimed as a legally-registered design, protected from unauthorized copying under the penalty of law.
The sari design is now the "exclusive intellectual property" of the Missionaries of Charity, the order the late Calcutta nun founded in 1950, The Guardian reports.
Biswajit Sarkar, a lawyer for the Missionaries of Charity, said the trademark was established to stop the "misuse" of the saint's reputation.
He cited such examples as a child's version of the sari for sale on Amazon's India store and religious books published with the distinctive blue-striped trimming.
"Now if anybody is misrepresenting the Missionaries of Charity, we can take severe legal action," Sarkar, who works for the group pro bono, told the Guardian. He said his next mission is to get a copyright for Teresa's name, which is already being used by a bank.
Mother Teresa, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her lifetime of global missionary work, died in 1997. Last September, Pope Francis canonized her as a saint in recognition of her lifetime of global missionary work.
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