advertisement
After decades of concern, the outlook of foreign entities over India’s intellectual property rights regime (IPR) is beginning to turn positive, thanks to a realisation in the country that innovation will be meaningless without legal protection for creativity, say experts.
Anand feels that modernisation efforts at patent offices, amendment of rules to streamline procedures, recruitment of a large number of examiners to handle the volumes of patent applications and efforts to reduce backlog are positive changes in this domain.
Corroborating this, Andrew Bradshaw, director, Asian Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, said Western countries feel there has been a lot of difference in India’s intellectual property rights protection after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive for a better regime.
Bradshaw added that law enforcement was equally important as India steps up the regime. India’s ranking globally on intellectual property has also not been encouraging.
According to the International Property Rights Index, published by the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation’s Property Rights Alliance, India was ranked 62nd globally in 2015. India’s score in 2015 was 5.2 – lower than its score of 5.5 in 2014.The report analysed the regimes of 129 nations, both on the legal and political environments.
Regarding enforcement, Anand said it was important to ensure that strong laws that the country has on protection of piracy and counterfeiting should be taken to their logical conclusion by way of implementation.
Another legal expert at Adidas group, Pulin Kumar, advocated that making law is not sufficient if people are not aware of it. He also argued that Government support via dedicated enforcement agencies is needed.
The experts also pointed out towards abysmally low number of patents filed in India every year. In India, every year about 45,000 patent applications are filed which is a meagre amount as to compared to China’s one million patent applications per year.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)