Context: On Tuesday we reported on the decision by the Supreme Court of India (SCI) to affirm the Delhi High Court’s (HC) quashing of antitrust inquiries by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) (September 2, 2025 ip fray article).
What’s new: Now that we’ve seen two SCI decisions (the one in the CCI case as well another one in Novartis v. Natco Pharma, where the appeal was equally dismissed), we’d like to provide a brief follow-up:
- The SCI did not indicate any inclination with respect to the question of whether the Comptroller of Patents has exclusive jurisdiction over patent-related matters, thereby making it impossible for the CCI to investigate complaints over patent abuse. The absence of pending complaints was deemed dispositive and no other question was reached.
- Similarly, the SCI threw out an appeal against a Delhi HC judgment declaring a Novartis patent invalid because the claimed invention may have offered advantages with respect to bioavailability and solubility, but the Delhi HC was not persuaded of those advantages amounting to therapeutic benefits justifying a more specific patent (species) involving a known agent (genus). In that case, the dispositive fact for the SCI’s purposes was simply the expiration of the patent, meaning that even if the patent was revalidated, there could not be an injunction anyway.
Direct impact: Obviously, those disputes have been put to rest.
Wider ramifications:
- In the CCI set of cases, the situation is what we had explained before (partly in the free and partly in the premium part of our report on Tuesday), and we’ve seen some local commentary that agreed. It’s a reasonable assumption that further CCI investigations involving allegations of patent abuse are rather likely to be quashed by the Delhi HC. That leaves the question of whether the CCI will even consider it a good use of its resources to try. Even if it investigated ten more patent-related complaints in the coming years, the chances of a single one not being resolved by the time it reaches the SCI are slim. It just takes too long to get there, and in the meantime a license agreement will be struck.
- In the Novartis case, the (in)validity question would have been an important one to resolve. It is easier to imagine a future pharma case in which the issue will not be mooted by the time it reaches the SCI than in a standard-essential patent (SEP) or other patent abuse context.
- Ultimately, the question is whether the SCI has any appetite for patent-related cases or prefers to avoid having to deal with them in the first place. It’s been over a decade since the SCI last addressed similar questions of law substantively.
Judicial economy is important, and none of the above is meant to doubt it. But patents have a limited life span, and even in faster jurisdictions than India (whose judiciary is slowed down by a rotation system and resource constraints), patents will often expire before they reach the top court, or parties will reach license agreements before a competition authority concludes an antitrust investigation.
Case in point, Sisvel v. Haier is a pair of decisions by the Federal Court of Justice of Germany. In the first one, it was actually a key consideration that the implementer employed delay tactics so that the patent expired along the way. Regardless of whether one agrees with Sisvel v. Haier, there can be no doubt about the significance of those top-court rulings to the evolution of the case law. All that was really at issue between the parties toward the end was the allocation of court fees and the reimbursement of legal fees. In India, fee-shifting is not the norm, and in any event, the amounts of court fees and legal fee caps for purposes of reimbursement are usually not even worth litigating.
In the absence of SCI decisions that actually address (even if only in the form of obiter dicta) some pressing issues of patent law, forum-shopping will be encouraged. It is not impossible to overcome the Delhi HC’s precedent, but the concept of stare decisis (upholding prior rulings) makes it a bit of a long shot.