Intellectual Property Rights in India: Acts and Terms

Intellectual property is the property in creations of the mind: an invention, a brand name, a book, a song, the shape of a product, the name of a place attached to a craft. The law gives the creator an exclusive right over such a creation for a fixed period, so that invention pays for itself and the knowledge still enters the public domain in the end. Economy and awareness papers ask this topic for its Acts, its terms of protection and its international treaties, and the questions are almost always about a number or a name.

The kinds of intellectual property

• Patent: an exclusive right over a new invention, a product or a process, that is novel, involves an inventive step and is capable of industrial application.
• Copyright: the right of the author of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, a film or a sound recording, which arises on creation without any registration.
• Trademark: a mark, word, device or shape that distinguishes the goods or services of one trader from another, such as a brand name or a logo.
• Industrial design: the shape, configuration, pattern or ornament applied to an article, protecting how a thing looks rather than how it works.
• Geographical indication: a sign on goods whose quality or reputation comes from a particular place, such as a tea from a hill district or a silk from a town.
• Trade secret: commercially valuable information kept confidential, protected in India by contract and the common law rather than by a special statute.
• Plant varieties and layout designs: new plant varieties with the rights of farmers, and the layout designs of semiconductor integrated circuits, each under its own Act.

The Indian laws and their terms

For a film, a sound recording, a photograph or an anonymous work, copyright runs for sixty years from the year of publication rather than from the death of the author. The Patents Act of 1970 was amended in 1999, 2002 and 2005 to bring Indian law in line with the obligations India took on at the World Trade Organization; the amendment of 2005 introduced product patents in food, drugs and chemicals, which until then carried only process patents. Section 3(d) of the Act refuses a patent to a new form of a known substance that shows no enhanced efficacy, the provision that prevents what is called evergreening of pharmaceutical patents. Section 84 allows a compulsory licence three years after the grant of a patent if the invention is not available to the public at a reasonable price or is not worked in India.

Who administers these rights in India

Patents, designs, trademarks and geographical indications are administered by the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, which works under the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and has its headquarters at Mumbai. The head patent office is at Kolkata, with branches at Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, and the Geographical Indications Registry is at Chennai. The Copyright Office also comes under the same Department. The Intellectual Property Appellate Board, which heard appeals in these matters, was abolished by the Tribunals Reforms Act of 2021 and its work passed to the High Courts and commercial courts. The National Intellectual Property Rights Policy of 2016, with the slogan Creative India, Innovative India, brought all the forms of intellectual property under one policy framework, and the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, built by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research with the Ministry of Ayush, documents Indian traditional knowledge so that it cannot be patented abroad, as happened in the turmeric and neem cases.

The international framework

The World Intellectual Property Organization, created by a convention of 1967 and a specialised agency of the United Nations with its headquarters at Geneva, administers most of the treaties in this field. The Paris Convention of 1883 covers industrial property and the Berne Convention of 1886 covers copyright. The Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known as TRIPS, came with the founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995 and fixed the minimum standards that members must provide, including the twenty year patent term. The Patent Cooperation Treaty allows a single international application, and the Madrid Protocol a single international application for trademarks. The Doha Declaration of 2001 confirmed that TRIPS does not prevent a member from protecting public health, which is the basis of the compulsory licence provisions. World Intellectual Property Day is observed on 26 April.