About aop.onl

Welcome to Ali on Patents.

Some promises take a long time to fulfil. In the preface to the treatise I wrote in 2007, The Law of Patents — With a Special Focus on Pharmaceuticals in India, I made a promise:

In an effort to keep the book alive, I have started a weblog at www.thelawofpatents.blogspot.com to discuss matters pertaining to the book. Periodic updates quoting the relevant paragraph numbers from the book will also be made available to interested readers.

When the IPKat reviewed the book, they said: “The author hopes that this title will eventually evolve into a wiki - a reflection on our imminent departure from the world of paper.” It took me about two decades to deliver on both the promise and the hope. Here is the treatise as a living, online-native record that can be updated as quickly as a wiki, or, should I say, a one-man wiki. It has changed not only in its content but also in the way in which you receive and read it. It is a treatise that has broken away from the material and production constraints that bound its text, its printed pages and its distribution. What you have before you is a treatise that grows, and hopefully grows beyond me, that accommodates the nuances in the law that a practitioner needs and that caters to patent law’s multifaceted audience — the patent lawyer, the patent agent, the in-house counsel, the patent examiner, the judge, the law professor, the law student, the pharmacy student, the inventor and many more.

Welcome again, and I hope you find it useful.

Feroz Ali

How the record is made

Case pages are generated from the judgment of the court. They contain extracts inside quotation marks denoting the words of the court as pronounced, held together with a minimum of connecting words. The page will still read well and read like the judgment of the court. Each case page records the name of the court, the bench, the date of judgment, the citations where available, whether the case is still good law, and a headnote which summarises the finding in the case. The case page begins with a summary of the case in the court’s own words and a list of points the court decided, in its own words. Each page then carries “What the court did not decide”, where the court has left a point open, and “Subsequent treatment”. The provisions and topics towards the end of each page will help you find other similar cases. The commentary is kept for the doctrine pages. Under “Cited in”, each case page links to the doctrine pages that discuss the case. I review the case pages before they are published.

Doctrine pages carry the law on a single issue or a set of connected issues. They are written by me. Each doctrine page opens with a question followed by a short answer on what the law on the point is, most of the time anchored in a provision of the Indian Patents Act, 1970. What follows is a commentary on the law, the legal provisions and the case law on the point, ending with links to other connected pages under the heading “See also”. As on the case pages, you will find provisions and topics towards the end of each page, which will take you to other pages where these provisions and topics are discussed. The case pages a doctrine page relies on are listed under “Cases on this page”. Since the doctrine pages were written at a time when there was no Indian case law on some of the issues, you will find some of the doctrine pages still relying on English cases. My endeavour is to replace them with home-grown cases as and when they appear.

The case pages and doctrine pages are connected simply through hyperlinks, a thing traditional treatises achieved with a whole apparatus: Table of Cases, Subject Index, cross-references in the text and footnotes.

As an online-native record, it bears the date of every update and revision. The paragraph numbers on the doctrine pages are permanent. If I add a paragraph, say, between 12 and 13, it will be numbered 12A. If I remove a paragraph, its number will stay on the page with a line saying where the law went, and the paragraph will still be available for reference.

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Cite this record

The “Copy citation” button on every case page and doctrine page allows you to copy the title of the page, the name of this record and the page’s address, followed by the date on which you copied it:

Novartis AG v Union of India, Ali on Patents, www.aop.onl/novartis (accessed on 21 September 2026).

Writ Jurisdiction in Patent Matters, Ali on Patents, www.aop.onl/writ-jurisdiction (accessed on 21 September 2026).

To cite a particular passage of a doctrine page, add its paragraph number — “para 12”, or “paras 12–14”. To cite para 8 from Lack of Utility, add #8 at the end of the www.aop.onl/utility#8.

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