Tracking Indian Patent Litigation: Section 104 Transfers, IPD Codes and the Five Forums

Explainer · Patent Litigation

Updated for 2026 · Claw Editorial

A patent dispute in India rarely stays in one place. A matter can start as an opposition before the Controller, move to a district court as an infringement suit, and then jump to a High Court the moment the defendant files a revocation counterclaim, all under the same underlying patent. Most case-tracking tools are built to follow one case in one forum. This explainer sets out the five forums a patent dispute can occupy, the rule that forces a mid-case transfer, a recent Delhi High Court case that shows why the distinction matters, and what tracking tools do and do not cover at each stage.

01Why patent matters are hard to track

Tracking a patent case is not the same problem as tracking a civil suit or a Section 138 cheque-bounce matter. A civil suit is filed in one court and stays there, subject to the normal chain of appeals. A patent dispute over the same invention can sit in front of the Controller of Patents, a district court, and a High Court, sometimes within months of each other, because different statutory provisions send different questions to different forums.

The result is that a single patent, say a pharmaceutical compound patent, can generate a pre-grant opposition before the Controller, a post-grant opposition before an Opposition Board, an infringement suit in a district court once the patent is commercialised, and a revocation petition or a compulsory-licence application, all live at overlapping times and all technically about the "same" patent. A docketing system that assumes one case equals one forum, one case number, one court, will misrepresent the matter the moment any of these events happens.

The sharpest version of this problem is a forum change mid-suit. Indian patent law has a specific rule that forces exactly this: the moment a defendant in an infringement suit raises a revocation counterclaim, the case leaves the district court and moves to the High Court, because only a High Court can revoke a patent.

02Section 104 and the revocation-counterclaim transfer

Section 104 of the Patents Act, 1970 fixes where an infringement suit can be filed: not in any court below a district court, and in some cities, directly in the High Court where that High Court has ordinary original civil jurisdiction (Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras). That part is a straightforward jurisdiction rule.

The proviso to Section 104 is what creates the tracking problem. It says that where the defendant raises a counter-claim for revocation of the patent, the suit, together with the counter-claim, must be transferred to the High Court for decision. This is not optional and it is not a matter of convenience. It happens because a district court has no power to revoke a patent, revocation is a High Court power under Section 64, so the moment a genuine revocation counterclaim is on record, the district court loses jurisdiction to continue and the entire suit, infringement claim and all, moves up.

This is why "tracking a patent case" cannot mean tracking a fixed case number in a fixed court. It has to mean tracking the underlying dispute, including its forum, across a transfer that the statute itself can force at any point after the written statement is filed.

03The Macleods case: revocation is not the same as an invalidity defence

A January 2025 Delhi High Court decision sharpens why the forum distinction matters, and not just as a filing technicality.

In Macleods Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. The Controller of Patents & Anr., C.O.(COMM.IPD-PAT) 38/2022 (Delhi High Court, decided 15 January 2025), Macleods had filed a revocation petition under Section 64 against a patent covering the anti-diabetic drug linagliptin. The Court used the case to draw out a distinction that is easy to blur in everyday case-tracking: a defence of invalidity raised under Section 107 in an infringement suit is not the same thing as a revocation under Section 64, even though both attack the validity of the same patent.

• Forum: a Section 107 invalidity defence can be decided by whichever court, district court or High Court, is already hearing the infringement suit. A Section 64 revocation can only be decided by a High Court, whether as a standalone revocation petition or as a counterclaim that has triggered the Section 104 transfer.
• Effect: a finding of invalidity under Section 107 operates only between the parties to that suit (in personam). It does not, by itself, take the patent off the Register, so the same patent can still be enforced against someone else. A successful Section 64 revocation is a finding against the world (in rem): the patent comes off the Register entirely.
• Remedy: only a revocation proceeding under Section 64 can lead to the Controller being directed to amend or strike the patent from the Register under the related provisions. An invalidity defence inside a suit cannot do that on its own.

For anyone building or relying on a docketing record, the takeaway is concrete: a matter tagged simply as "patent validity challenge" hides a fact that changes what the outcome will actually do. Two cases that look identical in a spreadsheet, both raising invalidity against the same patent, can end in completely different consequences depending on whether the challenge was framed as a Section 107 defence or a Section 64 revocation. A tracking system that does not record which one is in play, and which forum is actually deciding it, is not giving an accurate picture of the matter.

04The five forums a patent dispute can occupy

Put together, an Indian patent dispute can move through, or sit concurrently in, five distinct forums over its life. The table below sets out each stage, the provision that sends it there, and whether it shows up in ordinary case-tracking software.

Notice the split: the first three rows are administrative proceedings that live inside the patent office and its internal boards, not court cases. A pure litigation-tracking tool, built for court dockets, does not follow them at all. A registry-side IP module, the kind that also watches trademark renewals and journal publications, can pick up the compliance and hearing dates that arise from these proceedings (see Where Claw fits, below), but the underlying decision, whether to allow the opposition or grant the licence, is still the Controller's or the Board's alone. The last two rows are genuine court matters, tracked end to end once a case number exists.

This is also why teams that only track litigation software often assume a patent dispute "started" when the infringement suit was filed. In reality it may have been alive as an opposition for years before that, with no court docket entry at all.

05The registry layer: InPASS, the E-register, and Controller orders

Before a dispute ever reaches a court, the record of the patent itself lives with the Indian Patent Office, not with any court registry. There are three public-facing pieces to check.

InPASS

The Indian Patent Advanced Search System (InPASS), run by the Patent Office, is the free public portal for searching published patent applications and granted patents. It is genuinely useful for checking a competitor’s patent status at no cost. It also has a practical limit: a single query returns up to roughly 1,000 records, shown 25 to a page, so a broad keyword or classification search on a crowded technology area can silently truncate results rather than showing everything on record. Narrower searches, by application number, applicant name, or a tight date range, are more reliable than a broad keyword sweep.

The E-register

The Patent E-register is the Patent Office’s record of a specific patent’s bibliographic and status history: grant date, renewal payments, assignments, and any recorded proceedings against it. It is the closest thing to a title record for a patent, and it is where a status change from an opposition or a Controller order eventually gets reflected.

What does not appear

One category of application is deliberately absent from all of this: applications under a Section 35 secrecy direction, issued where the Controller considers an invention relevant to national defence. By design, such an application is not published and no patent is granted while the direction is in force, so it will not appear in InPASS, the E-register, or any public search, however carefully the query is built. This is not a portal limitation, it is the statute working as intended.

The practical point for anyone tracking patent disputes is that the registry layer (InPASS, the E-register, Controller orders) and the court layer (district court and High Court IPD case status) are two separate systems, maintained separately, and no single free public tool currently unifies both.

06Delhi High Court Rules Governing Patent Suits, 2022

Once a patent matter is in front of the Delhi High Court, whether as an infringement suit that has stayed there, a suit transferred in after a revocation counterclaim, or a standalone revocation petition, it is governed by the High Court of Delhi Rules Governing Patent Suits, 2022, alongside the general Commercial Courts Act framework. These rules add procedural steps that a generic civil-suit docket will not anticipate.

• Three case-management hearings are built into the timeline, the first largely for framing issues on claim construction, invalidity, and infringement based on the parties’ briefs, and a later one for streamlining how evidence, including expert evidence, will be recorded.
• A panel of scientific advisers is available to assist the judge on the technical subject matter, with each adviser required to declare they have no conflict of interest before being appointed to a matter.
• Hot-tubbing, where experts from both sides give evidence together and answer questions concurrently rather than in separate sequential examinations, can be directed by the Court, including before issues are even framed, to reduce the risk of one-sided or misleading expert testimony.
• Confidentiality clubs can be constituted, restricting sensitive technical or commercial material to a defined set of lawyers, experts, and named client representatives, so that confidential formulations or processes are not exposed more broadly than necessary during the suit.

None of these steps exist in an ordinary commercial suit docket. A tracking system built only for hearing dates and orders will miss that a "case management hearing" in a patent suit is a defined procedural stage with its own expected outputs, not just another listing.

07What it costs to track patent portfolios at scale

Teams that need to watch patent filings and disputes across a whole portfolio, rather than a single case, generally turn to dedicated patent-analytics platforms rather than litigation-tracking software, since the job is closer to competitive intelligence than case management. Pricing for these platforms is not public, and figures circulate mainly through vendor-comparison sites, so any number should be treated as indicative rather than a quote.

One such comparison, published by an analytics-advisory site that itself sells competing patent-intelligence consulting services, puts enterprise annual pricing at roughly $30,000 to $60,000 for PatSnap, $40,000 to $80,000 for Derwent Innovation, and $25,000 to $50,000 for Orbit Intelligence, with the final number depending heavily on the modules and user seats included. These platforms are built for patent landscaping, portfolio analytics, and prior-art search, a different job from tracking the day-to-day progress of a specific dispute through a court.

08Where Claw fits

Claw is an all-in-one legaltech platform for Indian advocates, law firms, and corporate legal teams, combining AI-based case search, an AI legal assistant (Legal GPT), case management, and compliance automation across all Indian courts and tribunals.

For a patent dispute that moves across the forums above, that combination matters, because the forums are not all the same kind of proceeding. Claw’s IPR Solutions tab covers the registry side of a patent: it monitors the Patent Office journal for conflicting filings, and tracks pending compliances, including annuity payments and response deadlines, and pending hearings that arise from a patent filing, along with the related documents and tasks. Alongside that, Claw’s litigation tracking follows the court side: infringement suits in a district court, and High Court IP Division matters such as revocation petitions and appeals filed as C.O.(COMM.IPD-PAT) or C.A.(COMM.IPD-PAT), picking up hearings, orders, and cause-list listings automatically, with WhatsApp and email alerts and AI auto-compliance that reads an order and schedules the resulting deadline. On top of both, Claw’s judgement research (30 crore-plus judgements) and LegalGPT let a team check how a forum or a provision has actually been read by the courts, without leaving the platform.

To be precise about the boundary: Claw does not decide, and cannot pre-empt, what the Controller or the Opposition Board will do with an opposition or a compulsory-licence application, that is theirs alone to adjudicate, and Claw does not replicate InPASS’s full-text prior-art search across the entire patent corpus. Those stay with the Patent Office process and with dedicated patent-analytics platforms of the kind discussed above. Because the Section 104 proviso can also move an infringement suit from a district court to a High Court IPD mid-case, a tracking system built to follow the underlying dispute, registry compliance and court status together, rather than a single fixed case number, is what keeps a docket accurate through that transfer.

Claw’s pricing is published rather than quote-only: a free plan for individual advocates, a Premium plan at Rs 1,099 per month (Rs 10,999 per year), and Enterprise on quote. For a one-off check on a specific dispute rather than a subscription, Claw also offers pay-per-search litigation search, at roughly Rs 250 per search. On raw depth, honest gaps remain: teams running large multi-jurisdiction patent portfolios with foreign annuity-payment services still look to global docketing platforms such as Anaqua, Clarivate, or Dennemeyer; very high-volume, per-record docketing for a specialist Indian IP firm is a depth that firms such as Iolite or JSK focus on; and USPTO or CIPO-first filing automation is a job tools such as Alt Legal are built around. Within India, for the specific job of tracking a patent’s registry compliance and its court litigation in one place, Claw is built to be the all-in-one option, which is also why it is priced as a single subscription rather than a per-module quote.

For the wider set of tools built for litigation tracking generally, see the legal software comparison for India. For how the newer commercial-court rules affect the docketing side of patent matters, see the registry deadline map for trademarks, which walks through the equivalent compliance calendar for a trademark. Trademark disputes follow a related but distinct set of forums and are covered separately in trademark renewal and rectification under Section 124.

09Sources and further reading

Primary and official sources used in this explainer:

• Patents Act, 1970, Section 104 (official text): ipindia.gov.in
• Patents Act, 1970, Section 104 (full text with proviso): indiankanoon.org
• Macleods Pharmaceuticals Ltd. v. The Controller of Patents & Anr., C.O.(COMM.IPD-PAT) 38/2022, Delhi HC, 15 January 2025: indiankanoon.org
• InPASS (Indian Patent Advanced Search System, official): iprsearch.ipindia.gov.in
• High Court of Delhi Rules Governing Patent Suits, 2022 (official notification): delhihighcourt.nic.in
• Claw: clawlaw.in

Analytics-platform pricing figures are drawn from third-party vendor-comparison sources, not from the vendors themselves, and should be confirmed directly with each vendor before relying on them.

10Frequently asked questions