An Overview On Patent Rights And Action To Be Taken On Patent Infringement

Abstract:

Infringement of a patent means infringement of the exclusive rights granted by the patent. Under Section 48 of the Patents Act, 1970 the patentee has the exclusive right to prevent any third party, without his consent, from making, using, offering for sale, selling, or importing for those purposes the patented product; or in case of a process patent, the exclusive rights to prevent any third party from using that process and from using, offering for sale, selling, or importing the product obtained directly by the patented process.
In India, the duration of each patent is 20 years from the date of filing the patent application, irrespective of whether it is filed with provisional or full specification. However, in the case of requests submitted under the Patent Cooperative Treaty (PCT), the 20-year period begins from the international filing day.
Patent can be qualified only if all three criteria are fulfilled respectively i.e. of Novelty, Inventive Step and being Capable of Industrial application, failure of any of the three will result in the patent as unqualified and thus, the application for the same will be rejected.

Authored by Preeti Selvam, Mumbai University