Prof. Feroz Ali has launched Ali on Patents (www.aop.onl), a free, online version of the treatise he first published in 2007. In his launch note on linkedin, he says that everything on the site is either his own words or the words of the court, with no AI-written prose in between. The resource is meant for a wide readership: patent lawyers and agents, in-house counsel, examiners, judges, academics, students and inventors, among others.
The site has two kinds of pages: Case Page and Doctrine Page. Case Pages are built from the judgments. They provide verbatim extracts from the judgments in quotation marks with minimal connecting words. They also provide details including the bench, date of judgment/order, citations, a good law flag, a headnote, and sections on What the court did not decide and Subsequent treatment. Doctrine pages are written by Prof. Ali himself. Each doctrine page opens with a question and a short answer anchored in a provision of the Patents Act, followed by commentary and links to the relevant cases.
Exciting as it is, I had to try it. I used the Kerala High Court’s Ribociclib judgment, which Ambika and I wrote about here. The judgment is dated 28 September. The case page was updated on 5 October, and the doctrine page on Government Use of Inventions, which discusses the judgment, updated on 7 October.
What I liked the most is that you can see the Court’s reasoning in its own words, with paragraph numbers, without going through the whole judgment first. The doctrine page sets the High Court’s finding that Section 100 is “required to be invoked” for exorbitantly priced medicines right next to its finding that invocation is a “policy decision” for the Central Government. In our post, we read these as pulling in different directions and left open whether Section 100 is mandatory once exorbitant pricing is shown. Prof. Ali’s page gives readers the material to judge that for themselves. The case page also brings out the Court’s engagement with Garware Wall Ropes and the Section 47 versus Section 100 distinction, which was a pleasure to revisit.
This still does not replace the full judgment. Case pages are extracts, so for a citation or a close reading, one must keep the judgment open alongside. If you want to read a new judgment, the case page tells you what was decided, what the Court said on each point, and whether the case still stands. If you want to learn a new doctrine, the doctrine page gives you the question, the short answer, and the cases that matter, all in one place.
Prof. Ali has invited readers to look up a case they know and say what they’d like added. The resource is still in beta, but it is already worth bookmarking. Start with a case or doctrine you want to read up on, and let him know what you want to be added!