Indian Patent Office Gives CRIs A New Lease Of Life

With the advent of AI, Big Data and the IoT, there have been further challenges on how to apply law and protection mechanisms to innovations. The latest guidelines released by the IPO are a step forward in this direction…

New CRI Guidelines Introduced

The patentability requirements and examination criteria for computer-related inventions have been under scrutiny in major jurisdictions of the world. Considering the special nature of this ever-evolving field, there have been discussions and changes as well as interpretations of legislation on how best to protect this fast-paced innovation where each invention has a short life. The advent of AI, Big Data, and the Internet of Things has further brought new challenges into the forefront requiring clarity on how to apply the law and protection mechanisms to inventions in these high-tech fields. The latest guidelines released by the IPO are a forward and welcome step in this direction.

Initiatives by the IPO

In India specifically, there has been increasing interest in both software products and services. There has been growth in the industry as well as the market for ICT products. The Indian ICT sector has several Indian as well as multinational R&D innovation centers and is a hotbed of innovation. Consequently, this has led to an increase in patent filings and has resulted in initiatives by the IPO in the form of examination guidelines for CRI. In the past few years, these have gone through a lot of changes.

The guidance for examining software-related inventions was first introduced in the 'Manual for Patent Practice and Procedure' in 2005. It underwent several changes and different versions of this manual released thereafter in 2008, 2010 and 2011. In 2013, a separate draft set of guidelines apart from the manual was released dedicated only to the examination of computer-related inventions. These were revised in 2015, but were soon put in abeyance with a new set replacing them in early 2016. However, these seem to have been released under pressure since the SFLC had written a letter directly to the PMO complaining about the "unfair" protection offered under the 2015 guidelines. These guidelines could not hold water since they were against the legislative intent and had been formed without giving much thought. Since then, after extensive deliberations and several stakeholder meetings, the latest guidelines have recently been released on 30th June 2017.

Major Changes

The guidelines of 2016 had placed the presence of "novel hardware" as a patentability requirement for software-related inventions. One of the major changes brought about in the latest version is that this requirement has been removed as it was clearly against the intention of the legislature. Apart from that, all examples of non-patentable inventions which were earlier given have been removed. It has also been clarified that systems for encoding, reducing noise in communications/ electrical/electronic systems or encrypting/ decrypting electronic communications will not be regarded as mathematical methods and will be considered patentable.

Disclaimer – The views expressed in this article are the personal views of the authors and are purely informative in nature.