Inventiveness:A New Condition for Patentability

Recent amendments to the Indian Patent Act 1970 have brought the Indian laws at par with the laws of other countries for the purpose of determining whether a proposed invention really satisfies all the conditions of patentability namely, novelty, inventiveness and utility. Inventiveness is considered different from novelty. Novelty assessment is quantitative in the sense that if there is only one prior art reference then the novelty is lost. Obviousness on the other hand requires a series of assessments culminating in an often-qualitative judgment about the creative achievement of the invention. Further, the invention needs to be seen "as a whole" or in totality meaning thereby that the invention cannot be broken into parts for this assessment.