Current Trends of Intellectual Property Law in India

The twenty-first century will be the century of knowledge, indeed the century of the intellect. A nation’s ability to translate knowledge into wealth and social good through innovations will determine its future. Thus innovations hold the key to the creation as well as processing of knowledge. Intellectual property can be characterized as the property in ideas or their expression. It is a creation of the mind, which protects the rights of individuals and businesses who have transformed their ideas into property by granting rights to the owners of those properties. Intellectual property can be classified into the following four categories: patents for inventions, copyrights for literary works, trademarks, and trade secrets. In the paper the researcher will be dealing with the following issues as the development of intellectual property in India has always engendered heated debate and keen interest around the world. In recent years India has made robust progress not only in implementing its obligations under the WTO Agreement on TRIPs Rights, but also in developing its own IP regime which endeavors to balance the trade-off between monopoly rights and free access to knowledge. Although no new IP laws have been enacted over the last year, it would be wrong to say that there have been no parliamentary developments with respect to intellectual property. The project focuses on issues like what is the most important IP development in India over the past 12 months? How are India's laws evolving to protect IP domestically? How is IP case law developing in India, such as in the case of pharmaceutical patents? Is India still placed on United States Trade Reprenstative’s Special 301 Watch List in 2010? What further legislation is necessary to bring India’s IP regime up to international standards and recent efforts have been made to improve enforcement of IP legislation in India? Fair, strong and non discriminatory IPR enforcement only create economic incentives that encourage innovation thus it’s necessary to bring India’s IP regime high up to international standards and the paper gives certain recommendations like awareness among right holders, policy dealing machinery, etc