New Delhi: India’s intellectual property right creation has jumped significantly in the last seven years as the number of patents granted has increased by five times. Meanwhile, the registration of trademarks, another important intellectual property right, has increased by over four times in the last seven years.
The Centre launched the Intellectual Property Rights(IPR) Policy in 2016 to make the country an innovation hub. Under this policy, the rules for registration of trademarks and patents were relaxed. These measures included a reduction in the number of forms for trademarks and patents. For instance, there were 74 forms for registration of trademarks, but now the number of forms required has been reduced to just eight.
Similarly for patents, all the forms were scrapped with the requirement of only one form left. “Only those industries which invest in Knowledge and Innovation would survive. And for Knowledge and Innovation to survive, Intellectual Property becomes a very, very important tool,” Anurag Jain, Secretary DPIIT told the media in New Delhi on Tuesday.
What are Intellectual Property Rights?
Intellectual property rights are those rights that are the creation of an inventor’s intellect such as a novel design, a music, art, new business or manufacturing process. These rights are called copyrights. For instance, the rights of an author or inventor over their literary and artistic works such as books and other writings, musical compositions, paintings, sculpture, computer programs and films are protected by copyright, for a minimum period of 50 years after the death of the inventor or author. Similarly, industrial rights are also included in intellectual property rights such as a distinct sign or logo used by business and companies.
Intellectual property rights also include Geo-graphical indicator tags. These GI tags are assigned to those goods, services and products including fruits, spices and other crops that have some special attributes due to their association with a particular place such as Scotch Whiskey or India’s Basmati Rice.
India 3rd largest startup capital in the world
According to the top DPIIT official, in the last six years, after the launch of startup initiative, the country has become the third largest startup ecosystem in the world. In terms of creation of Unicorns -- the startups having the value of over $1 billion -- India overtook China to acquire the second spot in the world. The top officer informed that on an average 80 new startups are getting registered in the country everyday which is the highest in the world.
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