Patching the Patent: Intellectual Property in Post-Sale Software Updates to Medical Devices in India

Introduction A modern infusion pump, pacemaker programmer or radiology workstation is rarely a finished object at the point of sale. The manufacturer keeps changing it: firmware patches, feature unlocks, and now machine-learning models that are retrained and pushed out long after the device has left the factory. That ongoing change creates a problem Indian intellectual property law never set out to solve. When the code on a device that has already been sold is rewritten, does the rewrite...