Tag: IPAB

At the heart of a patent application lies its claims. A claim is a signifier of the scope of protection that is sought under the patent. Claims are the first and most important aspect to be examined during prosecution, infringement, and litigation. Every patent application must be accompanied by at least one claim, and usually, an application contains several more. ......

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. ......

Applying for a patent is a race against time to secure the earliest priority date (i.e., the date of the first filing of a patent application). As a result, patent applications are often filed with accompanying data that do not always capture all the facets of the invention. In such cases, using post-filing data to support the applications is often the only course available. ......

Can “any person” oppose a patent application before it is granted? Or must persons now provide their credentials before filing oppositions? Are there circumstances when such oppositions cannot be entertained? The Bombay High Court was faced with questions like these in the recent case of Dhaval Diyora vs. Union of India (WP(L) 3718/2020; 05 November 2020). ......

A divisional patent application (also known simply as a “divisional”) is a patent application that is based on, or derived from, a previously-filed parent application. Divisionals are filed when the claims in a parent application pertain to more than one invention. ......

The first administrative encounter in the long road to patent protection is with the Indian Patent Office (the ‘IPO’). Here, the Controller is the key decision-maker in matters of the grant and renewal of patents. Naturally, this decision-making authority, powerful as it is, is also safeguarded through various legal provisions so as to be shielded from abuse. ......

Besides the patentability requirements of novelty, inventive step, and being capable of industrial applicability, a patent application must also meet the enablement requirement in order to be granted. A patent application is said to be enabled if the application provides sufficient details that enable a person of ordinary skill in the related field to practice the invention. ......

The Madras High Court earlier this year rejected a writ petition filed against a patent owned by Kibow Biotech Inc. for a dietary supplement that aids in the carrying out of the kidney function, for reasons, among others, that there was no expert evidence led to support the case. The validity of the patent was challenged primarily under Section 3(e) of the Patents Act, i.e., on grounds that it was “a substance obtained by a mere admixture resulting only in the aggregation of the properties of the components thereof or a process for producing such substance”....