We are thrilled to bring to our readers’ notice that SpicyIP has been cited in the Economic Survey 2017-18 that was tabled in the Parliament by the Government on Monday.
Chapter 9 of the Survey (titled ‘Ease of Doing Business’ Next Frontier: Timely Justice’) in footnote 16 refers to a SpicyIP post authored by Prashant while discussing the grant of injunctions by courts as one of the possible reasons for pendency and delay in disposal of economic cases. Prashant, in his post, had put forth the findings of an empirical study carried out by him and Aparajita (a former blogger) according to which final judgments had been delivered only in 5 out of 143 patent infringement lawsuits filed before the Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Gujarat High Courts between 2005 and 2010. It is these statistics that have been referred to in the Survey. The relevant part of the Survey is extracted below:
“9.15 Rising pendency also results from the injunction of cases by Courts. For example, in the case of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) cases shown in Table 2 below, injunctions have led to about 60 percent of cases being stayed, whose average pendency is 4.3 years.[15] Lengthy interim orders, ex parte ad interim stays, increasing rate of pendency of cases at final arguments, and few final judgments in IPR cases are common traits of IPR practice across different High Courts.[16] Nearly 50% of these cases are pending at the stage of pleadings, which is the stage at which parties are required to complete formal requirements before hearing (Annex XI and Annex XII).”
[15] The increasing tendency (See Annexure 10) to grant injunctions at the interim stage has fundamentally altered the nature of IPR litigation before the High Courts, which led the Supreme Court in a recent case to ask “if the High Court had thought it proper to write such an exhaustive (interim) judgment only because of acceptance of the fact that the interim orders in Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) matters in the Delhi High Court would govern the parties for a long duration of time and disposal of the main suit is a far cry.” M/s AZ Tech (India) & Anr. v. M/s Intex Technologies (India) Ltd. & Anr.
[16] https://spicyip.com/2017/06/143-patent-infringement-lawsuits-between-2005-and-2015-only-5-judgments.html.
Image from here