Intellectual Property

The official fee for a patent application in India is calculated on the basis of the following factors: • the type of applicant, • number of priorities (additional fee for each priority above 1), • the total number of pages (additional fee for each page above 30) and • the number of claims in the application (additional fee for each claim above 10). ... ...

A patent application can be filed either alone or jointly, by any person claiming to be the true and first inventor of the invention, or by the assignee of such person, or the legal representative of a deceased person who immediately before their death was entitled to make such an application. ......

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. ......

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. ......

The Indian Patent Office is responsible for administering the Indian law of patents, and its roles include patent administration, patent duration, and patent renewal, among other things. There are four patent offices in India, located in different cities, i.e., Chennai (in southern India), Delhi (in northern India), Kolkata (in eastern India), and Mumbai (in western India). In geographical terms, these four offices cover the length and breadth of the entire country. ......

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. ......