JUDGMENT

SANJEEV NARULA, J.:

1. This judgment addresses the refusal of Indian Patent Application No. 201611041718 for the ‘PORTABLE VEHICLE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM’ (‘subject patent application’). The refusal order, issued by the Assistant Controller of Patents & Designs on 27th December, 2018 (‘the impugned order’), asserts that the subject patent does not meet the inventive step requirement as stipulated under Section 2(1)(ja) of the Indian Patent Act, 1970 (‘the Act’). Thus, according to the Controller, the subject patent fails to qualify as an invention under Section 2(1)(j) of the Act.

PROCEEDINGS LEADING TO THE PRESENT APPEAL:

2. The appellant applied for the subject patent on 6th December, 2016 before the Indian Patent Office (‘IPO’). Thereafter, the appellant filed the request for examination dated 1st December, 2017. Consequently, the First Examination Report (‘FER’) dated 21st March, 2018 was issued by the IPO claiming that the subject patent application lacked novelty and inventive step required under Section 2(1)(ja) of the Act. The FER was issued referencing prior art D1: US7103460B1, D2: DE60036650T2, and D3: US20140306817A1. Furthermore, the claims were found to be non- patentable under Sections 3(m) and 3(k) of the Act. In response, the appellant submitted a response to the said FER with amendments to the claims and certain explanations on 9th April, 2018. Despite these submissions, the Patent Office remained unconvinced, leading to the issuance of a hearing notice on 29th June, 2018. This notice restated the existing objections under Sections 3(m), 3(k), and 2(1)(j) of the Act and introduced a new prior art reference, D4: US20020197033. During the subsequent hearing, the appellant successfully addressed the novelty objection. Nevertheless, an additional hearing notice dated 17th July, 2018, introduced a fresh objection under Section 2(1)(ja) of the Act. The notice detailed:

“As discussed during hearing held on 16/07/2018 for the application no.

201611041718, Following citations are found relevant in addition to the citation cited in hearing notice:

D5: US20150019266A1 (Whole document, especially Para [0018]-[0020]; Para [0045]; Para [0127]; fig 1)

D6: US20150112504A1 (Para [0106])

As in the hearing, you argued that in present application device is a portable device which can be ported from one vehicle to another, having all the sensors inbuilt which can be monitored wirelessly, the same is being disclosed in the cited document D5 where a portable device is disclosed which has all the sensors inbuilt and can be monitored wirelessly through a remote server. For more information, refer to the relevant description given in the parenthesis.

In addition to above citations, many similar devices were available in the market before the priority date of present application. Few examples of such devices are following:

1) Vectu Portable Vehicle Tracker (Date first listed on Amazon February 3, 2016)

2) LandAirSea SilverCloud SYNC Real-time Tracking Device Covert OBD2 GPS Tracker for Vehicles”

3. Following the hearing, the appellant submitted a revised set of claims, numbered 1-14. Of these, Claim 1 stands as the sole independent claim and is detailed below:

“1. A vehicle tracker (102) for monitoring operation of a vehicle, wherein the vehicle tracker (102) comprises: a connection port (216) configured to selectively connect the vehicle tracker (102) with a power source of the vehicle, the connection port configured to receive power from the power source; a rechargeable battery to power the portable vehicle tracker (102) when power is unavailable from the power source of the vehicle, the rechargeable battery configured to be charged using power from the power source; a plurality of sensors (504), the plurality of sensors interfaced with a processor (502) of the vehicle tracker (102) for sensing a plurality of parameters from inside a vehicle cabin, wherein the sensing results in generation of a plurality of current parameter values (518) of t