Delhi High Court Upholds Order Rejecting Ericsson's Data Security Invention Patent

The Delhi High Court has upheld a 2019 order of the Patent Office rejecting a patent application filed by Swedish telecom major Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson for a data security invention. The court held that the claimed method did not involve an inventive step and was obvious in light of existing technology.

Dismissing Ericsson's appeal, the court said there was no reason to interfere with the findings of the Patent Office.

In a judgment dated December 24, 2025, a single-judge Bench of Justice Tejas Karia noted that the Patent Office had given detailed reasons for rejecting Ericsson's application.

The court agreed with the conclusion that a person skilled in the art would find the claimed method obvious when read alongside prior art documents.

Referring to the technical analysis, the court observed, “The Impugned Order provides the detailed and adequate reasoning on how it would be obvious for PSITA to separate ordered delivery data and unordered delivery data in a security protocol running on top of the transport protocol in light of documents D1 to D3.”

Ericsson's application related to a method for providing data security where information may be delivered both in order and out of order. The invention proposed separating ordered and unordered data at the security protocol layer, adding sequence numbers to unordered data, and applying different security processing depending on how the data was delivered.

The Indian application flowed from an international patent titled “Protection of Data Delivered Out-of-Order” and claimed priority from a U.S. filing made in March 2005. After a First Examination Report was issued in 2015 and a hearing was held in July 2019, the Patent Office rejected the application for lack of inventive step.

Ericsson, in challenge before HC, argued that its invention addressed a real technical gap. It said existing security protocols were built around ordered delivery and struggled when data arrived out of sequence. According to Ericsson, its method solved this by cleanly separating the two kinds of data and securing them differently.

The Patent Office, represented by the Controller General of Patents, countered this by pointing to earlier documents that already disclosed ordered and unordered data delivery, the use of sequence numbers, and security processing adapted to different transmission modes.

After examining those prior art documents, the court sided with the Patent Office. It held that the core features claimed by Ericsson were already known at the relevant time and that combining them would have been obvious to a skilled person.

As the court put it, “Documents D1 to D3 as discussed earlier, disclose about TCP, SCTP, UDP, TLS and the insertion of sequence number in message and sequences. These cited Documents also discuss the ordered and unordered delivery of data or messages and modified SSL or TLS. In other words, these features are available in the prior art at the priority date of the subject application.”

On this reasoning, the court upheld the rejection under Section 2(1)(ja) of the Patents Act and dismissed Ericsson's appeal.

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