On January 5, 2026, the Madras High Court in India issued a ruling in the case of Flipkart Internet Private Ltd. v. the Joint Director General of Patents and Designs of India and the artificial intelligence company Voicemonk Inc. The court dismissed Flipkart’s appeal and upheld the Indian Patent Office’s earlier decision to reject the opposition, thereby maintaining the validity of Indian Patent IN312437 held by Voicemonk.
The patent in question, IN312437, is titled “Systems and Methods for Virtual Agents to Help Customers and Businesses.” The patent was filed on November 18, 2016, and granted in May 2019. It primarily relates to an AI virtual agent system for e-commerce and software applications that can receive user voice input, recognize user intent, and automatically perform multiple operations—such as searching, sorting, selecting, submitting, and comparing—thereby eliminating the cumbersome process of repeatedly switching between multiple pages and effectively improving the efficiency of online shopping and software interaction.
In September 2021, Flipkart filed an opposition with the Indian Patent Office, requesting the revocation of the patent. Flipkart argued that the patent lacked novelty and inventive step, did not fall within the scope of patentable subject matter, and contained an insufficient disclosure in the specification. It also alleged that the patent holder had violated Section 8 of the Indian Patents Act regarding the obligation to disclose information on foreign applications. In October 2023, the Indian Patent Office rejected all grounds for opposition and upheld the patent’s validity; Flipkart subsequently filed an appeal with the Madras High Court.
This litigation primarily revolves around the various grounds for “post-grant opposition” set forth in Section 25 of the Indian Patents Act, covering six core issues: whether the patented technology had been disclosed in the prior art before the filing date; whether the relevant technology was known to the public or in open use in India before the filing date; whether the patent possesses inventive step over the prior art; whether the subject matter of the patent meets the requirements for grant and does not fall under the exclusion for “mere computer programs” in Section 3 (k)’s exclusion for “mere computer programs,” whether the complete specification clearly and fully discloses the technical solution to satisfy the requirement of sufficient disclosure, and whether the patent holder violated the statutory obligation to disclose information regarding foreign patents—six core issues.
Regarding the disputes over novelty and inventive step, the court held that the Patent Office had conducted a point-by-point comparison of the seven prior art documents submitted by Flipkart against the key technical features in the claims of the patent in question. The Patent Office pointed out that none of the prior art disclosed the patent-in-suit’s overall technical solution regarding the automatic association and execution of multiple application operations by a virtual agent, nor did it disclose the three types of operational association methods defined in the claims—sequential association, hierarchical association, and horizontal association—and therefore, the prior art was insufficient to negate the novelty and non-obviousness of the patent-in-suit.
Furthermore, regarding the dispute over whether the patent-in-suit constitutes a “computer program as such” as defined by the Indian Patents Act, the court likewise supported the Patent Office’s position. The court noted that the patent in question does not relate solely to an algorithm or a computer program in and of itself, but rather to a complete, practical system that operates through the collaborative functioning of virtual agent hardware and a server. The dependent claims further specify concrete implementation methods such as speech recognition, action association, and page merging. The entire solution effectively simplifies user operations, reduces page navigation, and delivers practical, implementable optimizations in actual use.
In summary, the court held that the Indian Patent Office had conducted a thorough examination and that the original decision did not warrant judicial intervention. Consequently, the court dismissed Flipkart’s appeal and upheld the validity of Voicemonk’s Indian Patent IN312437.
Attached: Judgment
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