Same Bottle, Same Wine? – SpicyIP

The CGPDTM released the much-awaited CRI Guidelines 2025 today evening. The previous version of these guidelines were released in 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017. (2015 guidelines were scrapped after criticism) On a first look, its heartening to see that the released guidelines are replete with illustrative examples. This will help the examiners to apply the law although the jurisprudence on the law has been questionable. The Public notice of IPO also mentions that comments received for version 2.0 as well as feedback received in in-stakeholder meeting will be released soon.

As authors on this blog have pointed on various occasions, the jurisprudence on patentability of software was growing increasingly fragmented (and technical!) Recently, I, Swaraj and Bharathwaj Ramakrishnan (Anushka Dhankar contributed to the comments on first draft guidelines) had submitted comments in response to Draft CRI guidelines- version 1.0 and version 2.0. In our comments, apart from other problems, we had highlighted the lack of acknowledgement on IPO’s part of the increasingly fragmented (sometimes contradictory too) nature of case laws on sec. 3(k). You can find our comments for version 1.0 and version 2.0.

We are grateful to the IPO for accepting our recommendation- releasing comments submitted by various stakeholders on the guidelines to be put out in public domain. The increased transparency in the process demonstrates that the guidelines are part of a deliberative process. However, a major problem persists- the guidelines, still, fail to acknowledge that the jurisprudence on 3(k) stands fragmented. As I wrote in comments in this post- “acknowledging the problem is a first step towards resolving it.”

Since the released guidelines will not do much to resolve the conflicting jurisprudence, we hope that the IPO will take care of the highlighted problems for future iterations of the CRI Guidelines.