Delhi High Court extends deadline for views on new IP rules
The Delhi High Court in India has extended its deadline for inviting opinions on proposed rules concerning its new IP division, in the wake of the dismantling of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB).
According to an announcement posted by the court’s registry on October 26, the revised deadline for comments on the Delhi High Court’s IP Rights Division Rules from members of the bar is now November 10, 2021.
The development was first reported by India-based legal blog, Live Law.
When IPAB was abolished on April 4, 2021, its cases were transferred to India’s high courts. The Delhi High Court created a special IP division, and a roster of five judges were assigned to it from the commercial division.
The IP division of the Delhi High Court will function as a trial court and appellate court with the power to review cases on appeal and to reverse earlier decisions regarding patents, designs, trademarks, and geographical indications, and other laws previously dealt with by IPAB in India.
The court appointed a committee to review how a large volume of IP cases should be dealt with, which included Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, Justice Dhirubhai Naranbhai Patel, as well as Justice Pratibha Singh and Justice Sanjeev Narula as its members.
The new rules stem from India’s Tribunal Reforms Act, 2021, and the recommendations issued by the committee last month.
The proposals comprise 31 rules comprising definitions, filing and nomenclature, the procedure for appeals, different petitions, intervention, summary adjudication, guidelines of written submissions and timelines for oral submissions, costs.
In a jurisdiction report for WIPR, DPS Parmar, the head of the IPAB practice group at LexOrbis, wrote that high courts in Bombay, Madras, Kolkata and Ahmedabad have not yet taken similar procedural steps to receive the appeal cases.
This, he explained, raised the question of what inventors appealing to these courts will face in the future and suggested that the country’s high courts may have different setups or even different rules in the future.
Parmar predicted that a new setup with five judges dedicated to IP matters would now take up over 3,000 cases transferred from IPAB on a daily basis, and it may take over a year to liquidate this backlog.
“This would usher in an era of IP dispute resolution mechanism on a permanent basis without the stigma of vacant positions that nixed the functioning of IPAB on several occasions during the 15 years of its glorious but often chequered history,” he wrote.
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