IPAB Orders – Where Art Thou? (And Here’s Our Backup Copy)

It’s now been almost a year since the introduction of the Tribunals Reforms Act, 2021, which put an official end to India’s Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB), moving its jurisdiction back to the High Courts. There have been a few questions lingering from this transfer though. For instance, as pointed out in the comments on this post – Is there clarity on territorial jurisdiction for various High Courts for pending and new cases that would’ve gone to IPAB? What exactly is the jurisprudential value of the orders passed by the IPAB? I would assume they’re persuasive and not binding – happy to have anyone with more insight on this, let us know in the comments. Regardless though – another question is – where does one find the IPAB orders anyway! Not very surprisingly, there doesn’t seem to be any publicly available repository for these, as they disappeared when the IPAB’s website was pulled down!

From what I understand, currently, lawyers are having to rely on older copies of IPAB orders that they may have had, or have to use paid databases to access what should be publicly available case law.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, this wasn’t exactly a surprising development, and in anticipation of this, in April 2021 I asked Lokesh Vyas to help me download orders, notifications, etc from the IPAB website before it all disappeared. (Huge shoutout to him for his patient work on this tedious labour intensive exercise!). There were about 730 files, coming to about 1.5 gb of data. We’ve now uploaded them into a google drive folder here below.

Copy of orders, etc as available on IPAB Website in April 2021.

To note: Unfortunately, we didn’t get around to downloading materials after April 2021, and if I recall correctly, the website didn’t have orders from before 2019. So if anyone has official copies of orders etc that are missing from this collection and would like to share it with us, we could add it into this folder. While we didn’t try to capture things like ‘announcements’ etc, I believe we’ve captured most, if not all of the orders, along with a few other peripherals that were up on the IPAB’s website as of April 7th, 2021. However, in case you find that we’ve missed some, do let us know as well.
The files we’ve shared here are being provided ‘as is’. As to the folder nesting structure, we’ve tried to replicate the hierarchy as was available on the website. Here too, do let us know if there are any mistakes, etc.