New Delhi:
Arun Jaitley announces the Intellectual Property Rights (IPC) policy.
Here are the highlights from his speech: - The widespread of Intellectual Property Rights is big in india.
- The objective behind the IPR policy is quite clear, when there are new inventions, when there is growth in trade, commerce and industry, an IPR must be there to protect them.
- If we look into how widespread this is, we see that there are various aspects of this in law. There is copyright law, it deals with trade dressing and the commercial identity of the product.
- And one of the underlying factors is that each man must sell his product under his / her own name and identity. One person can't steal anyone's identity.
- If you steal somebody’s identity and piggy back on it, it’s called commercial theft.
- In India, we have a very effective and robust trademark law in place, but the policy deals with the mechanism of trademark registration.
- Trademark offices have been modernized, and we aim to bring the time taken to a few months, and the aim is to reduce the time taken for registration to just 1 month by 2017.
- There has been a huge change in copyright sector.
- A big change that has come about is that the copyright law used to originally have relevance only with books and publications, which is why copyright was a law that used to be handled by the HRD ministry.
- A decision has been taken that now, the copyright law will also come under IPR.
- There will be a nodal ministry to coordinate and consult with different departments.
- Nodal agency to be Department Of Industrial Policy & Promotion.
- Films, music, industrial drawings will be all covered by copyright.
- Similarly, Semi-Conductors Act, which was overseen by the Department of Electronics, keeping the same logic and reasons behind it, it's been moved under Department of IIP. And the coordination process will be the same.
- There is also a Designs Act, and a significant law in this is that of Patents.
- With this there is also another emerging field, that of Geographical Indices, for any such product that has to do with a specified / certain area / geographical location.
- This was originally there only in the West (Internationally).
- For example, Scotch was associated with Scotland, Champagne with France, and so on.
- For us it comes down to Basmati rice, Kanjivaram Sarees and Darjeeling Tea.
- These are all products that have to do with 'geographical location'. All this comes under the Department of IIP.
- So this is done from the point of view of registration of all the things mentioned above.
- The most important law of all these is that of the 'Patent Law' because Patent law has to do with invention and innovation.
- Patent is the reward of the invention, but some patents require invention as well as R&D, and hence, for the benefit of all (jann hit mein) we need them to be balanced.
- For example, Pharma patents for public healthcare. We need a balancing act in such areas.
- We need this so that cost of medicines don't get affected because patents may give rise to a monopolistic situation, hence a balancing act is needed.
- There are 7 objectives behind this policy.
- IPR, Awareness, Outreach, and Promotion is the first one - Why public awareness is required in all these different areas.
- Second objective is to create an atmosphere of inventibility and innovation, so that we stimulate the generation of IPRs itself.
- The third is that there is a legislative framework for this, and we believe that our existing laws, they are all WTO compliant, and as and when global trends move forward, a continuous evolution of these laws will always be required.
- The fourth is 'Administration and Management', which will include the process and need of registration, because our capacity in government departments wasn't much. These have now been upgraded.
- The fifth objective is 'Commercialisation of the IPR itself. So that he, whose product, invention, music, book - It is his/her right to use it commercially to its capacity.
- Sixth is 'Enforcement and Adjudication'.
- And Seventh is the most key one - that as IPR laws in India is coming of its age, the development of human capital, so that in Universities and educational institutions we have adequate people (patent examiners) These are important.
- These will all be under the Department of IPP and these will all be put in the public domain - on the website. It will be available to you all.
- If you have clarification, please feel free to ask. Thank you.