The Patent Office vide its notification dated June 6, 2014 has informed the general public that due to technical glitches, some of the patent applications which were opened to the public at the expiry of the prescribed period and were made available to the public through IPAIRS but not in the pdf format in the official journal of the Patent Office (that is issued every week on Friday) was now made available in the pdf format in the journal issued this week. It is worth noting that the current official journal as issued by the Patent Office had fourteen parts.
Some of the points that are to be noted in this regard are:
- Except in cases where secrecy directions are imposed, or the application has been abandoned or withdrawn (three months prior to the specified period), Section 11A (3) of the patent Act mandates all applications to be published on the expiry of eighteen months from the date of filing of application or the date of priority of application, whichever is earlier.
- On and from the date of publication of the application and until the date of grant of patent, an applicant has the like privileges and rights as if a patent for the invention had been granted on the date of publication.
- Though the applicant is not entitled to institute any proceedings for infringement until the patent is granted, the applicant can claim damages from the date of publication after the grant of patent.
The aforesaid clearly highlights the significance of publication of the application. Thus the Patent Office’s efforts to publish all such application that were notified on IPAIRS but not in the office journal are commendable. It is also to be noted that IPAIRS is the Indian Patent Information Retrieval System available on the Patent Office website where online record of published and granted applications are maintained.
The notice further specifies that specific journal numbers in which the applications were supposed to have been published and corresponding publication dates were duly ascribed to the respective applications.
The said notification and the published applications can be accessed from the Official Journal available at the Patent Office’s website at http://www.ipindia.nic.in/.
Public Notice issued by the CGPDTM.