What Constitutes Prior Art?

Prior art constitutes all the information available to the public (both patent and non-patent literature) all over the world before a given date that might be relevant to the claims of originality. Patent literature includes issued patents and pending patent applications. Non-patent literature includes any piece of information accessible to public, before the date of…

What is a Provisional Application?

A provisional application is a type of patent application which allows inventors and applicants to obtain a priority to file for a bundle of rights that protect the invention. Therefore, it is important to understand that, a provisional application itself is not an application to get the actual rights. It is important to make the…

Ancora Techs., Inc. v. Apple, Inc. illustrates the benefits of keeping things simple

On 3rd March 2014, Apple, Inc. (Apple) lost a case against Ancora Techs., Inc. The case was relating to claim construction (understanding the meaning of claims). This case illustrates the importance of writing clear claims and how clearly worded claims save the day, if and when a patent gets involved in a litigation. The case…

“Technical effect” requirement for Computer Related Inventions (CRIs): a mere guideline or a law?

The patentability requirements for Computer Related Inventions (CRIs) under Indian Patent Law have been unclear. It is generally understood that a CRI must demonstrate “technical effect” and the relevant claims must have “machine limitation”, in addition to the basic patentability requirements of novelty, inventive step, and industrial applicability. However, the phrase “technical effect” has not…

Revised Draft Manual: A case of over simplification re software inventions

The Indian patent office has published a revised draft manual on 04 November 2010. This manual is a revised version of the previous draft manual published in 2008. It is in this context that we revisit the requirements for patentability of software. Draft Manual, 2008: Section 3 of the Indian patent act provides exclusions covering the subject matter that…

Intellectual Property in the “cloud”ed era

Traditionally, computing has been done at defined and identified locations. For example, our computers, laptops, mobile phones, hosted servers, and so on. Cloud computing deviates from traditional computing by providing an abstraction layer on top of the various resources (like development/deployment of an application, processing instructions, and data storage) required in computing. By abstraction, I refer to…