Intellectual Property

Inventions that fall within, or overlap with, disclosures in the prior art are called “selection inventions”. Generally, selection inventions involve the selection of one or more specific embodiments, such as individual elements, subsets, or sub-ranges, within a larger known set or range disclosed in the prior art. This raises critical questions around how the novelty and inventive step of selection patents should be judged. ......

From filing a patent to its eventual grant, there are various stages that a patent application goes through in India. Patent filing is the primary step an inventor must initiate to protect their invention from being misused. Before a patent is granted, the Indian Patent Office (IPO) meticulously examines it, to ensure that the innovation sought to be patented is novel and involves an inventive step based on specific criteria. ......

Design marking is a method used by proprietors to signal that their article is protected by design rights. It entails “marking” an article in a manner that informs the public at large that the article in question is the subject matter of a registered design. The issue of whether design marking is necessary or not has come up on occasion before Indian courts, who have tackled how such marking acts as an indicator of registration, and explained the rights that follow. ......

Imagine you’ve started a business in your industry. You’ve identified and adopted the latest and most up-to-date technology, optimized it, and re-configured it to suit your business and to your advantage. You’ve innovated and built new processes and systems on top of existing solutions to create your unique offering. ......

India’s ace badminton player PV Sindhu created history by winning a bronze medal in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics held recently, joining the ranks of a select few who have one more than individual medal in the history of the games. ......

The Designs office has now made its register electronically available, thus joining the ranks of the Patents E-register, making the database of registered designs available in entirety. ......

In the first part of this two-part series, we offered a brief overview of NFTs and their applicability in the art world. This second part discusses the copyright and other related legal implications surrounding NFTs. ......

The business of purchasing art is traditionally associated with the sale of unique, physical objects whose source was verified by galleries, auction houses and, typically, a trail of paper, to distinguish an original from a copy. In the physical world, you can simply go and buy a painting that you wish to hang on your wall. ......

As intellectual property disputes grow in number in India, corresponding questions arise regarding the most appropriate adjudicating authority to be approached for redress. Besides regular courts, IP disputes also occasionally make their way into arbitrations. But the circumstances under which IP disputes can be referred to arbitration are not always clear. ......