JOIN USCabinet clears national IPR policy
The Union Cabinet on Friday cleared the National Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy that seeks to encourage creativity and provide an important tool to check theft of one person’s innovation by another.
“The aim is to create awareness about economic, social and cultural benefits of IPRs among all sections of society,” Finance Minister Arun Jaitley told reporters.
He said with this law it would take only 1 month to register a trademark as opposed to years that it takes now.
Assure identity
Jaitley said that in India, there were very effective and robust trademark law in place, but the policy was limited to the mechanism of trademark registration.
“If we look into how widespread this policy, we see that there are various aspects. 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, he said.
Jaitley also brushed aside concerns of US on India’s IPR regime, saying they were WTO-compliant. The US has kept India on its priority watch list on IPR policy.
7 objectives
IPR, awareness, outreach, and promotion
Create an atmosphere of inventibility and innovation
Replace existing outdated laws
Commercialisation of IPR
Human Capital Development for teaching, research and skill building in IPRs
Administration and management of innovation
Enforcement and adjudication