The evolution of standard essential patent litigation in India: from unfamiliar terrain to a structured forum

Standards, knowingly or unknowingly govern our everyday life and make products easy to manufacture, easy to sell and easy to use. Standards facilitate comfortable travel, ease of living and keep the world interconnected. Patents are an integral part of the standardisation process and thus hold immense value. The global standardisation bodies have prescribed norms for licensing of standards on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms – that are extremely futuristic. These terms ensure easy access to standardised technologies, while encouraging innovation through mandatory payment of royalties, instead of monopolisation. Standards are the unseen architecture of modern life, the silent protocols that allow a device fashioned by one hand to converse with a network built by another. In the last few years, India has become a part of this Standard-ecosystem which is integral to most countries and their economies. This article traces how a jurisdiction that began with almost no settled doctrine has, in little more than a decade, fashioned a coherent body of law for such patents. It follows the journey from the first tentative assertions against an industry scarcely aware that it owed anything, to a mature jurisdiction where the SEP owners and implementers are well aware of the adjudicatory processes, the legal principles which bind them and the manner in which they would obtain justice in a fair and transparent manner. India is now amongst the most neutral jurisdictions that is approached by SEP owners and implementers for resolution of their SEP disputes.