Everything you need to know about the new IPR policy
In this knowledge driven era, companies have no time to waste in creating an intellectual property strategy. The 21st century belongs to entrepreneurs. It is driven by creativity and innovation, which need to be protected and channelised for better use in future.
Enhancing the protection of IPR beyond the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the Indian government has announced an IPR policy that is compliant with global norms. Intellectual property (IP) is a collection of ideas and concepts, which can be protected through trademarks, copyrights and patents. If you make it easy for others to steal your ideas, you can ultimately end up washing away your own path to success.
The new IPR policy is designed in a way to facilitate the ease of doing business in India. The policy ensures credibility with potential investors and strategic partners encourages them to invest in India. India claims to have been pressurised by the US to make the IPR protection stricter in India to curb the piracy of music, movies and unlicensed software, which causes losses of $7 billion annually.
It has been announced that trademark registration will take only one month as per the IPR policy. After implementing this policy, copyright laws will be under the control of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (“DIPP”).
The new policy lays down seven objectives, which are briefly covered below.
- Creating awareness – The new policy aims to create awareness among all sections of society about the economic, social, and cultural benefits of IPR. It will be made a compulsory part of the curriculum in major institutions. The need to open a national research institute for IPR has also been proposed, to increase outreach.
- Innovation – To offset India’s growing foreign dependence, India needs to develop indigenous products. Through its national IPR policy, the government’s main thrust is to create an environment where people can think innovatively and generate innovation in every field. The policy will help mainly inventors and entrepreneurs who are dealing with an overload of knowledge and ideas that need to be protected (from infringers) through trademarks, copyrights or patents, as may be required.
- Balanced structure of legal framework – Protection of intellectual property can only be provided through well-defined laws, which balance the interests of the public with those of intellectual property owners. If there are no protection mechanisms in the legal system, then people will not be encouraged to create more intellectual property. The new policy will lead to stronger institutional monitoring mechanisms to curb IP offenses at the state level.
- Administration and Management– The policy aims to modernise and strengthen service-oriented IPR administration. Digitisation of all government filings has made it quite hassle free to register trademarks online by using IP India’s Site. By 2017, the government aims to lower the average time for pending IPR applications to 18 months (down from 5-7 years) and trademark registration to one month (down from 13 months).
- Commercialisation of IPRs – The policy aims to enable Indian companies to get value for IPRs through commercialisation. Most business owners do not know how their brand impacts the value of their business. A strong brand is nothing but an intangible asset that includes trademarks, copyrights, patents and trade secrets which are the intellectual property of that company. At the time of valuation or in case if the owner is considering selling his business, then intangible assets like your intellectual property can command more value than other tangible assets. Also, a well-protected brand attracts investors as they will feel safe to invest in a company that has everything secured in legal terms to avoid any future conflicts.
- Enforcement and Adjudication – Protecting intellectual property with trademarks, copyrights and patents plays an essential role in monetising innovation. By strengthening the enforcement and adjudicatory mechanisms for combating IPR infringements, a company can stop others from stealing its work. The process of opposing and safeguarding IP will involve coordination between various agencies and guiding IP owners to follow best practices to avoid digital piracy.
- Human Capital Development – To strengthen and expand human resources, the new policy calls for (i) new institutions and capacities for teaching, training, research and skill building in IPRs; (ii) the opening of R&D institutions; and (iii) making IPR a compulsory subject to be taught in schools and colleges. The aim is to develop a increasing pool of skilled IP experts, to facilitate the growth and judicious management of IP assets.
Wrapping it Up
After ‘Startup India’ and ‘Make in India’, India now needs to protect the ‘Creative India: Innovative India’ by simply registering everything that we create. Every new business owner should be aware of his IP rights and should hire a trusted intellectual property consultant to help drive out the myths and build a strategy to best protect the company.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.