Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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A Patent System’s Job is to Incentivize More Innovation, Not Merely More Patents: Looking at the New Patent (Amendment) Rules- Part I

/ By / Patent

[This post is co-authored with Praharsh.] Last week, the DPIIT published amendments to the Patent Rules, 2003, bringing changes to amongst other things, some important patent policy levers like working statement requirements, disclosure about corresponding foreign applications, pre-grant oppositions, etc. While there has been much vocal praise over the Rules in general, there has been surprisingly very little nuanced or analytical discussion of what these changes mean to the Indian Patent Eco-system as a whole (which includes more than just […]

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Indian Patent Office Puts out 1532 Orders in One Day!

/ By / Patent

How many Controller decisions are given in one day? Following a curious post by Sandeep Rathod on LinkedIn noting that a whopping 1500+ patent decisions, perhaps the largest ever in a single day, were put out yesterday, we took a quick look at the information available to see for ourselves. It looks like there’s been a large increase in the number of decisions being put out every day! For comparison, we took the first 15 days of this month (March

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Bayh Dole-esque Guidelines Notified by Dept of Biotechnology

/ By / Innovation, Patent

Earlier this month the Dept of Biotechnology notified the “DBT Intellectual Property Guidelines 2023“ (PDF) which they say ‘provide for ownership, transfer/commercializing of IP arising from DBT funded research outcomes”. The notification says that the Guidelines shall be applicable to all DBT funded extra-mural and intra-mural research organisations. (It’s unclear where the mandate is coming from, as guidelines generally do not have the power of law behind them but are merely discretionary / advisory). It also provides 2 links where

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Draft Patent Amendment Rules – Increasing Efficiency of Granting Patent Monopolies While Forgetting the Reason for Allowing Them in the First Place

/ By / Patent

[This post has been co-authored with Praharsh Gour. We’re also thankful to Tejaswini Kaushal and Varsha Sharma for their research assistance with this post. Tejaswini is a 3rd-year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) student at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow. Varsha is a 5th year law student pursuing B. A. LL.B (Hons.) from Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat.] Almost two years after the 2021 amendments to the Patent Rules 2003, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry has proposed a

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Searching for Indian IP History

/ By / Copyright

While the Indian IP landscape continues to grow at a breakneck speed, it’s “interesting” to see how little of any discussion is rooted in facts and figures. Indeed, the ‘fact vs faith’ approach is something that Prof Basheer had written about several times in the past (eg here and here). As I’ve noted in the past, this is not limited to India, however, there’s a peculiar problem for those who want to pursue more ‘fact-based’ research on IP in India

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Announcing the SpicyIP Empirical Scholarship Database Series!

/ By / Copyright, Patent, Publication

Moving from Faith-based positions to Fact-based positions has been a topic that Prof Shamnad Basheer had long been propounding on this blog, with several prominent examples such as the petition to the Government to make Indian patent information available online more than 15 years ago, to displaying glaring gaps in Form 27 declarations, from the “Indian Bayh Dole” issues, to countering claims about textbook prices, and more. Indeed, this commitment to fostering accountability and transparency in the Indian IP eco-system

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Sci-Hub and Public Libraries: Legal Deposit under The Delivery of Books and Newspaper (Public Libraries) Act 1954

/ By / Copyright

The on-going Sci-hub/libgen litigation, which initially drew a lot of hullabaloo, has been going on for a bit over 2 years now, with little to no movement on any substantive issues. Instead, it has mostly been adjournments and procedural issues. However, regardless of the outcome of the case itself, there seems to have been very little attention to why this situation has arisen in the first place. Some basic searching about the case online will throw up several articles about

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IP Reveries: Class 5.1 – Drugs, Secrets, and Innovation: Brooding Over The Basics

/ By / Drug Regulation, Overlaps in IP, Patent, Trade Secret

Prof Antilegend’s classes are back! After a few sessions on conceptual and theoretical ideas around IP, this set of sessions will now take the class on a different not-so-theoretical topic and deliberates upon IP issues that crop up around clinical trial test data, drug innovation, Indian drug regulatory regulation etc. If this is your first time coming across the IP Reveries series, you can see what its about as well as get links to our previous classes in the introductory

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Internet Archive's Wayback machine (which archives pages across the internet) showing an "HTTP 301" error, and redirecting the page to a website that seems to belong to karnataka state open university

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

/ By / Others

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

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the words 'all rights reserved'

IP Reveries: Class 4.2 Ruminating on the “R – Rights” of IPR!

/ By / Others

  The IP Reveries series is an experimental ‘fun’ series set in an imaginary classroom where we are using a dialogue format to raise questions and discussions around IP that traditionally don’t find a place to get voiced either due to long standing assumptions, or due to being seen as ‘too trivial’ to discuss in more formal settings. The series is authored by Lokesh Vyas and myself in equal measure. For a general introduction to this IP Reveries series, please check

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