Sound Board

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

Identifying and choosing a suitable business/brand name is perhaps the first and the most important step towards creating your very own startup. A lot of time and effort goes into searching for and settling on a suitable name, and its equally, if not more important to protect that name. A brand name that you chose is not merely a name, but a reflection of the ideas, thoughts and relevance of the business symbolized by designs, logos, patterns, colours etc,.

The Indian Trademark Office has once again initiated a special drive from December 2013 to January 2014 for disposal of requests for recordal of post registration changes of registered Trademarks. The original notification is available here. The first such special drive was initiated earlier this year in January 2013 and after postponing it several times was put into action in March 2013. However, only a limited number of applications were cleared during this drive.

If you ask any patent agent or attorney to explain the concept of patents in two words, they will tell you that it is an “exclusionary right”. As is true in law and life, with rights come duties and responsibilities. So when you are given the right to exclude others from making your patent accessible to the public without your permission, you are obligated to ensure that you make your patent accessible to the public.

At the risk of over-simplifying things and shooting myself in the foot, copyright is the stream of intellectual property law that protects individual’s creative work. Take for example when you are enjoying a meal at a restaurant; if you were to stop and think about it, copyright exists in the music playing in the background, the menu, the recipe of the food on the table, the design on the table cloth, the photographs on the wall, the software on their system which calculates and prints out the…

Trademarks are to the real world, what domain names are to the virtual world; Trademarks are vital to every business because they help consumers associate the goods or services provided by them to that particular trademark thereby building reputation. Similarly, the Internet is the first port of call for anyone who wants to find information about anything and therefore, it is essential for a company to make its presence felt in the virtual world through a website.

Before all else, I would like to clarify that this article does not deal with how to get a patent in India. This article merely describes the procedure for making a patent application in India. The decision to provide a person with a patent is purely an administrative matter of the Indian Patent Office. Therefore, it is not possible to provide a definitive answer to questions like “Will my product be patented?” or “How long will it take for me to get a patent?”

The Indian law for Patents, more particularly Section 8(1) of the Patents Act, 1970 (the “Act”), requires that when a person makes an application for patent in India, he must undertake to inform the Indian Patent Office regarding foreign applications which correspond to its Indian counterpart. However, the words used in Section 8(1) are broad enough to cover not just the invention for which the patent application has been made in India but also inventions which are “substantially the same” as…

After a trademark application sails through the journey of examination, advertisement and opposition, it reaches the final and happy stage of registration. When the online status of a mark shows registered, it means, as the term suggests, the mark has obtained registration and the applicant becomes the legal owner/registrant of the said mark. A registration certificate mentioning the details of the trademark (including date of registration, registration number, Journal in which it was…

Following up on my earlier post about the IP clause in an employment agreement, where I mentioned the contents of the clause ought to define the Intellectual Property, I figured that, that would be a good aspect to cover – Identifying IP.

Britannia Industries Limited had filed an application for the trademark SNAX, which they had claimed to have been using from 1965. Britannia had already registered trademarks BRITANNIA SNAX for biscuits breads, buns etc in Class 30. The trademark application for the mark SNAX was published in the Trademarks Journal in 2005 and was opposed by PepsiCo on the grounds that the mark SNAX is snacks misspelt and since snacks was a common English word; it should not be registered as a trademark.