Recent Development On The Assessment Of Inventive Step In India

Novelty and inventive step are the foundational requirements for the grant of a patent application around the world. While novelty is a straight-forward technical analysis of whether the invention is disclosed by a single prior art or not, determining the inventive step of an invention is a relatively trickier task. This is mainly because what seems obvious to one may not be obvious to another person. This sort of subjectivity brings a lot of inconsistency in this analysis, which could eventually lead to a wide array of decisions on the grant of patent applications. Therefore, to eliminate this subjectiveness and bring more objectivity to this analysis, quite a few guidelines and case laws have been identified for defining the process to be followed for judging the inventive step of an invention.