Tag: IPO

Tissue or organ replacement is a medical phenomenon that has saved human lives over the decades. With 3D bioprinting, where functional living human tissues and organs can be fabricated using 3D printing technology, the field has charted a new path, acquired more relevance, and provokes many questions, ethical, medical, legal and beyond. ......

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. ......

Reference signs are used to improve the intelligibility of claims. Sometimes also known as “reference numerals”, they help understand claims in light of the specification and drawings on record. If a patent application contains drawings, the claims can be clarified by establishing a connection between the features mentioned in the claims, corresponding to reference signs in the drawings. ......

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. ......

India has recently notified amendments to its patent rules which are likely to speed up, and significantly reduce the cost of, patent filing for applicants claiming priority from international applications. ......

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. ......

Recognising that startups can drive sustainable economic growth and generate large scale employment, the Government of India’s ‘Startup India’ Initiative has sought to develop an ecosystem to strengthen such entities. This ecosystem includes policies that reduce regulatory burdens and provide various concessions that make ‘doing business’ easy....