Tag: Bombay High Court

The Bombay High Court recently held that visual appeal is the ultimate test of a valid design, and that combining old integers into a form that creates a different visual appeal than its parts is also capable of qualifying as a design that is new and original. ......

Bombay High Court clarifies that patent applicants must provide substantive and complete responses to first examination reports, in order to meet the compliance requirements under Section 21(1) of the Patents Act, and to avoid the application being deemed abandoned. ...

Patent laws, including in India, usually allow oppositions to be filed against patent applications, either before or after they are granted. Appeals against decisions in opposition matters may also be permitted in some cases. In India, an appeal against a decision of a Controller may be filed in post-grant oppositions, but the law is not as straightforward when it comes to appeals in pre-grant oppositions. ......

The validity of put option clauses in contracts has been a subject of detailed scrutiny for the Indian government, for several years. The discourse surrounding put option clauses originated from Section 20 of the Securities Contracts (Regulation) Act, 1956 ("Act")—which was subsequently omitted by the 1995 amendment to the Act. ......

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. ......

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. ......

The Government of India, in February 2021, introduced the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (“Rules”) under the Information Technology Act, 2000 (“IT Act”), to regulate intermediaries, publishers and individual creators of news and current affairs content and online curated content. ......

One of the first questions that comes to the mind of an artist or a creator, as soon as a work is created, is how can the work be protected. Is protection available only if the work is “registered”, or does protection follow automatically from the time of its creation? The issue of whether copyright registration is compulsory or not is a long standing one; and due to various conflicting judgements in India, artists and creators have always been uncertain about this matter. ......

Licensing and franchising intellectual property (IP) offer strategic competitive advantages to a brand. Franchising is a situation where a franchisor controls and supervises the exploitation of a trademark while allowing the use of the tradename, the get up and the reputation and goodwill associated with the trademark. ......