INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (IPR)

Why is IPR becoming important?

• Increasing dominance of the new knowledge economy
• Exponential growth of scientific knowledge
• Increasing demand for new forms of intellectual property protection as well as access to IP related information
• Address the emerging complexities linked to IP in traditional knowledge, community knowledge and animate objects
• All these pose a challenge in setting up the new 21st century IP agenda, especially for a country like India

TRIPS
The WTO’s TRIPS Agreement is an attempt to narrow the gaps in the way these rights are protected around the world, and to bring them under common international rules. It establishes minimum levels of protection that each government has to give to the intellectual property of fellow WTO members. In doing so, it strikes a balance between the long term benefits and possible short term costs to society. Society benefits in the long term when intellectual property protection encourages creation and invention, especially when the period of protection expires and the creations and inventions enter the public domain. Governments are allowed to reduce any short term costs through various exceptions, for example to tackle public health problems. And, when there are trade disputes over intellectual property rights, the WTO’s dispute settlement system is now available.
The agreement covers five broad issues:

• how basic principles of the trading system and other international intellectual property agreements should be applied

• how to give adequate protection to intellectual property rights

• how countries should enforce those rights adequately in their own territories

• how to settle disputes on intellectual property between members of the WTO

• special transitional arrangements during the period when the new system is being introduced.

• Entailed significant changes for the protection of pharmaceutical products and processes
• Made product patent protection binding on all member countries
• Strengthened process patents. 
• Narrowly defined the conditions for establishing exceptions to patent rights 
• Limited the possibility of applying special modalities of compulsory licences to pharmaceuticals
India and IPRs
• India has enacted several laws to protect IPR

• Copyright Act
• Trademark Act
• Designs Act
• Patent Act, 1970
• Geographical Indications Act

India and TRIPS
• India has met its entire TRIPS obligations in various stages starting from providing mailbox applications in 1999 with retrospective effect
• Amendment to the Patent Act in 2003

• This amendment brought the Indian Patent Act more or less on a par with the developed countries by providing a 20 year patent term 
• Safeguarded national interest by remodelling compulsory licence provisions by introducing Bolar and Import Provisions

• 3rd amendment to Patents act in 2005 provided product patenting in pharmaceuticals, food, and chemicals, rationalising and reducing timelines for processing of patent applications and doing away with Exclusive Marketing Rights

Issues & Resolutions

• Effect on India’s pharmaceutical industry

• Resolution: the industry is taking steps to cope with the challenge. It is increasing its investment in R&D. Moving from imitative research to innovative research

• Effect on other knowledge based industries in India, such as the IT industry, biotechnology, and microelectronics
• Effect on limiting monopolies
o Resolution: there is voluntary licensing and compulsory licensing. For important drugs the government can resort to compulsory licensing. 
• The grant of patents on non-original innovations (particularly those linked to traditional medicines) which are based on what is already a part of the traditional knowledge of the developing world is a cause of concern

•  CSIR successfully challenged the US Patent on the wound healing properties of turmeric. Similarly patent on Neem was quashed. 
•  These issues need to be addressed jointly by the developing and the developed worlds
•  CSIR has created a Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL)

Way Forward
• India should nurture a strong innovation base through a balanced system of recognition and rewards
• India will have to invest liberally to enhance the skills and knowledge base of scientists and on understanding, interpreting and analysing the techno-legal business information contained in IP documents and in drafting of IP documents
• We must properly protect our inventions