India: Patent

The Madras High Court set aside a Patent Office refusal of an Elanco application (an oral composition for chronic in appetence and weight loss in companion animals), which had been rejected for lack of inventive step over the closest prior art.

For a woman battling metastatic breast cancer on a retired bank employee’s pension, the cost of a single 21-day course of targeted therapy, more than Rs. 58,000, was not merely a medical burden. It raised a larger legal question: can the Government use the statutory power available to it under the Patents Act to make a patented, life-saving medicine available to patients who cannot afford its market price?

The Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (CGPDTM) has issued a public notice moving the communication of First Examination Reports (FERs) in design applications to email. With effect from 2 October 2026, design FERs will ordinarily be sent only to the email address the applicant has provided in Form-1, under the “Address for Service in India” particulars, and physical dispatch by post will ordinarily stop. The office has framed the change as part of paperless administration and the Digital India initiative.

When a generative tool can produce a product's shape, packaging, or interface in seconds, the older assumptions behind design law start to strain. This piece asks who counts as the author or applicant when a human prompt and a machine's output are combined, what that combination does to novelty searches and disclosure risk, how ownership is actually allocated in AI platform contracts, and why a design registration is refused, or granted, in ways that copyright and patent protection are not.

India’s semiconductor ambitions are usually discussed in terms of fabs, packaging units, and PLI-linked investment. Less visible, but equally important for companies actually designing chips, is the legal regime that protects the layout itself — the specific arrangement of transistors, interconnects, and circuit elements that makes a chip work and that took months (or years) of design effort to create.

In a recent decision in Manash Kamal Bezboruah vs. Bokahola Tea Company Private Limited [2026 INSC 701], the Supreme Court of India ("Supreme Court"), reiterated that the supervisory jurisdiction of High Courts under Article 227 of the Constitution of India, though not ousted by the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 ("Arbitration Act"), must be exercised with extreme circumspection against orders passed by an arbitral tribunal under Section 16 of the Arbitration Act. The Supreme Court held that where an arbitral tribunal rejects a jurisdictional objection, interlocutory interference under Article 227 is warranted only in the exceptional situation of a patent lack of inherent jurisdiction, and the ordinary remedy lies under Section 34 after the final award.

AI-powered features in consumer apps can create patent exposure even when the model is licensed from a third party. This blog explains how Indian courts approach technical effect, claim construction, software-hardware overlap and defensive drafting, and proposes a practical product-feature review process for startups.

The High Court of Delhi through its judgment dated 23.07.2026 in the matter of Spectrum Power Generation Limited v. GAIL India Limited allowed a petition under Section 34 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 challenging an arbitral award rejecting the petitioner’s claim for reimbursement of Goods and Services Tax paid on transmission charges under a Gas Sale Agreement.

Learn the legal difference between patent and patent pending, false marking risks, territorial limits, Indian regulations, and best practices for businesses.