Sound Board

Our thoughts and views on the practice of Intellectual Property in India and around the world.

In its notification on July 2, 2014, the Indian Patent Office (IPO) forewarns patent applicants the consequences of not depositing a sample of the biological material with an International Depository Authority (IDA).

In a spate of orders recently (see here, here and here), the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) has asked the Indian Patent Office (IPO) to consider those matters afresh because the IPO’s orders lacked reasoning.

In a country like India where a patent is granted after fighting tooth and nail, “revocation” is arguably the most dreaded term for any patent-holder. A patent granted in India can sought to be revoked for more than one reason and statutorily in more than one forum.

In my earlier post on this matter, I discussed the importance of filing the statement of working for a patent without delving into the aspect of confidentiality or lack thereof when such statements are made. Statutorily, the statement of working may be published by the Patent Office and so the Patent Office has made available online the statements of working filed for the year 2012.

We bring you another guest post by Ratnavel Pandian. In this post, Ratnavel discusses the Indian statutory provisions for compulsory licensing and instances of compulsory licensing in India.

We bring you a guest post by Ratnavel Pandian, a third year student of National University of Juridical Sciences. In this post, he takes us through why the US faces pressure from its lawmakers to take India to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regarding India's patent regime and the unfairness of the whole scenario.

An order in January this year by the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (“IPAB”) drives home a simple, much re-iterated and often neglected point of law: the right to be heard.

In yet another upgrade, the Indian Patent office has made available few more facilities through its e-filing system (“system”). In general these changes pertain to requests which do not have a prescribed form in the Patent Rules. Since the increase in official fee for paper filing, it is only logical that the system be more comprehensive.

Last Friday, the Patent (Amendment) Rules, 2014 (the “Rules”) came into effect. The public notice issued by the Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trade Marks summarises that the Rules basically deal with a revised official fee structure and the inclusion of a new category of applicants called the “small entity”.