Case study of Madras High Court Judgement on the Requirements of Foreign Patent Filing Permission In the SELFDOT TECHNOLOGIES OPC PVT LTD v. Controller of Patent Chennai, the Hon’ble High Court of Madras speaking through Mr Justice Senthil Kumar Ramamurthy held on 28th November 2023 that the requirement of foreign filing permission under section 39 of the Patents Act is formal and procedural in nature and hence condonable. By its final order, the High Court directed the Madras Patent Office to receive afresh an application for Foreign Patent Filing permission and allow the same on appropriate terms. Actually, the Patent Application in question is an application for a Patent of Addition . The original application was filed in the Indian Patent Office which was duly followed up by an American Patent through PCT route. The ostensible reason for having this requirement of Foreign Patent Permission is to enable the Union of India to issue secrecy directions under Section 35 of the Pate
Nowadays, Indian social media particularly those sympathetic to the ruling establishment have been articulating stories against the Qatari government, after one of their courts (in a secret trial), found former Indian defense officers guilty of espionage on behalf of Israel. Mercifully, unlike the Kulbhushan Jadhav case, the families of the accused were intimated, and they also received Consular Access. However, the rest of the world does not know the specific charges against them or the contents of the judgment. Qatari law provides for statutory appeal against the Judgement. The appellate proceedings have been initiated with sufficient inputs from the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indian social media reports recently gloated about the fact that the IT infrastructure of the Qatari government suffered a serious cyber-attack. Some of these posts indicated that this demonstrates the increasing Indian clout in global affairs. I am of the opinion that the Indian general public react