An obituary for the IP Appellate Board
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Its tenure was a missed opportunity to develop the home-grown jurisprudence on patent law
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Its tenure was a missed opportunity to develop the home-grown jurisprudence on patent law
The demise of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB), India’s specialist tribunal for determining disputes relating to intellectual property (IP) rights, is symbolic of its tenuous life. For an organisation that was created in haste and managed in haste, the end came about, unsurprisingly, in haste.
The patent system is notorious for its bipolar nature. Ever since its inception, public opinion has been divided about the usefulness of the system. There have been regular calls for its abolition. The lack of unanimity about the system here was seen in the way Indian parliamentarians deliberated on patent bills in the past.
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A recent bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha by Minister of State Finance, Anurag Thakur. The bill proposed to reform the appointment of members and chairpersons in tribunals set up under various laws. It further provides a mechanism for filing an appeal directly to the commercial courts or the High Courts, as the case may be
[1], thereby dismantling various appellate tribunals including the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB) that is responsible for hearing appeals regarding patents, copyrights, trademarks and geographical indications.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY APPELLATE BOARD (IPAB)
The IPAB was established in the year 2003 under the Trademarks Act, 1999 for the speedy disposal of appeals including establishing a timeline of 3 months to file an appeal from the date the order passed by the Registrar of Trade Marks. The said provisions were adopted under the Patents Act, 1970, Copyright Act, 1957 and Geographical Indications of Goods (Regis
Thursday, April 15, 2021
Since the launch of the Apple Watch in 2015, Apple and Swatch, a well-known Swedish watch manufacturer, have been involved in a number of trade mark disputes in their now overlapping product markets.
These disputes have concerned the marks ‘I-WATCH’ and ‘I-SWATCH’, ‘TICK DIFFERENT’ and ‘THINK DIFFERENT’ and, more recently, the mark ‘ONE MORE THING’.
In 2015, Swatch filed an application to protect the word mark ‘ONE MORE THING’ in a number of jurisdictions around the world.
Apple opposed this application based on bad faith. Apple argued that the mark would be associated to Steve Jobs’ frequent use of this phrase when launching Apple products. Use that is dated back to 1998. Apple also noted that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, had revived the phrase in 2015, around the time of the filing, when launching the Apple watch.
in his store. In February 2019, the council’s trading standards team conducted a test purchase and received illegally packaged tobacco from the Brothers Pan Corner Limited shop on Stoke Poges Lane. The team seized 1,200 packs of cigarettes, 1,000 pouches of smokeless tobacco, and 60 pouches of hand-rolling tobacco after returning with Thames Valley Police tobacco sniffer dogs a week later who discovered the haul. Much of the seized tobacco bore either non-English labelling, non-statutory health warnings or was in non-plain and branded packaging, which fail under the Trade Marks Act 1994, Tobacco and Related Products Regulations 2016 and the Standardised Packaging of Tobacco Products Regulations 2015.
In the recent case of Piyush Ranipa v. State of Maharashtra, the Bombay High Court was faced with a question of law on whether offenses under the Copyright Act and the Trade Marks Act are non-bailable offenses.