Tag: Delhi High Court

A key question that confronts participants in any disruptive and innovative industry is that of intellectual property (IP) protection. Software is no exception. Multiple IP routes, e.g., copyrights, patents, and trade secrets, are available for protecting software, but the appropriate choice is not always automatically evident. ......

Much emphasis is placed in patent law on the importance of filing for protection as early as possible in the inventive process, in order to obtain necessary rights and benefits. But these applications are by no means set in stone. There is room to amend patent applications, and in India, amendments can be done both while an application is pending, and after a patent has been granted, subject to appropriate permissions from the Controller. ......

The principle of “unity of invention” is near universal to patent law and entails that a single patent application must relate to a single invention or to a group of linked inventions having a ‘single inventive concept’. If the application lacks unity of invention, the applicant may split the original application, and file a “divisional application” seeking protection for the (additional) plurality of inventions. ......

When hardcoded statutory deadlines are violated, can delays be condoned? This was the central question answered by the Delhi High Court in The European Union Represented by the European Commission vs. Union of India. The court allowed for an extension of a non-extendable statutory deadline in a patent matter because of the exceptional circumstances of the case. ......

The forum for adjudicating commercial suits in India is governed by the Commercial Courts Act, 2015 (“CCA”), where cases are heard by courts at different levels depending on the valuation of the suits. Lesser-valued cases are heard by courts lower in the judicial hierarchy and fall outside the direct scrutiny of the CCA, thus being subject to relatively lower regulation. ......

On January 24th, the Delhi government published a draft Motor Vehicles Aggregator Scheme (Scheme). Cab aggregators, quick commerce, and other delivery and passenger transport services in New Delhi are required to incorporate Electric Vehicles (EV) into their fleets and to cap surge pricing at set tariffs, among other requirements. ......

The Delhi High Court (Court) recently ruled that all food business operators must make a complete disclosure of all components and measurements used in a food product. This should include information about whether the substances are derived from plants or animals. According to the Court, everyone should be entirely aware of what they consume. ......

Patents are granted for inventions that are novel and involve an inventive step. Any information or material that is publicly available or published before the filing of a patent application is known as “prior art” and this forms the basis on which novelty and inventive step is determined. ......

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. ......