With the ongoing development around it was necessary to protect the rights of the owner of intellectual property since without protecting the innovative work that a person has spent his time on, there would be no promotion of invention and creativeness and without such development it would be impossible to expect the market grow beyond a close boundary.
Development can only be persisted if the rights of the producers and the one who are sweating over the invention are getting protection for their hard work. Without providing exclusivity to them, the market would copy each other and there would be no mark of quality and would be tough for the sellers as well as the buyers in the market to choose product of a quality.
With liberalization the challenge was bigger than before since, not only protection was needed to be given to the product in Indian market but also to protect the intellectual property rights in the international market to achieve exclusivity over the production and distribution of the same.
The same requirement was guaranteed by demonstrating India's commitment to the WTO under the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPS) , government took a leap of steps to make sure India's stance on Intellectual Property laws being acceptable on international level.
On every level, Government of India has made its efforts to make it possible to made Indian laws pertaining to IPR are recognized at global level since accession to the WTO.
Some of the developments are;
It started with the government of India replacing Trade and Merchandise Marks Act, 1958 with the Trade Marks Act, 1999 to bring the Indian trademarks law in persistence of international practice and to make sure India is keeping up its commitment to TRIPS agreement.
The following were the changes;
- Service marks were introduced to the protection, for the first time, through registration.
- Graphic representations, shapes and combinations of colors were induced in the definition of trademark.
An unprecedented step was taken by the trademark registry by issuing an order allowing alterations that may be made to an application for trademark registration. It included "substantial alterations", which would not be allowed and other alteration that may include clerical error/alteration would be accepted by the registrar.
- Interestingly the period of registration was also increased from 7 year to 10 years.
- Under the new law, both registered and unregistered trademarks can be assigned with or without the goodwill of the business.
India also enacted Geographical Identification of goods (Registration and Protection) Act 1999 which provides for registration and better protection of G.I. relating to products that would facilitate identification of goods associated with a place of production, quality, quantity or other distinctive characteristics of such goods.
Examples of such products which are now uniquely protected under the GIG act are Basmati rice, Darjeeling tea, Alphonso mangoes, Malabar Pepper, Hyderabadi Grapes etc. which are known in the international market for the quality and place of its production. These goods are of such high quality and place of production is so relevant to them, which made them stand different from any other product in the market which made such requirement of protection for them necessary.
There were constant amendments in copyright law to accommodate with the pace of development in the field and to comply with the WIPO copyright treaty and WIPO performance and phonograms treaty, which made sure that Indian laws are kept in loop for development in relation to newly introduced technological protection measures, which indeed ensured the fair use survives in the digital world by providing unique provisions for fair use, also amended author friendly changes, unique provisions for disabled, etc. to streamline copyright administration.
Recently, Government of India notified the Copyright (Amendment) Rules, 2021 on March 30, 2021, amending the Copyright rules 2013. Although, the draft of this amendment was made public for opinion in 2019. The bill is similar to draft in many dimensions. Main highlight of which is 'copyright board' being replaced by 'appellate board'.
Plenty of emphasis has been given to the amendments, which are identical to the draft, based on the functioning of copyright societies in India. This includes provisions relating to formation of traceable systems for collection and distribution of royalties, the system of dealing with royalties for works whose authors cannot be located or identified, and the facility to search from the database of a copyright society.
Recent amendments are also been made in the patent laws since The Patent (Amendment) Rules 2020 (Revised Rules 2020) came into force from 20 October 2020. Before the Revised Rules 2020, patentees and licensees were supposed to submit statement of commercial working for each annum (January to December). Since, income statements in India are generally generated for a financial year (from 1 April to 31 March), the Revised Rules 2020 will significantly ease filing of statement of commercial working of a patented invention for every financial year.
The amendments make several procedural changes such as replacing the publication of notifications in the Official Gazette with Copyright Journal, and recognition of electronic means of operation.
The ambit of IPR is ever growing and these amendments are necessary to keep up with the pace of development as it requires. Changes are imperative to this field, especially, when world is competing it has become duty of state to protect the rights of the inventors and to promote more of the welfare of the society, more of such changes are needed to be done in near future.
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