1.8.4. Major Issues: IPR

♤ India-US Intellectual property Rights tussle: Intellectual Property protection is a key issue for India-US relationship. International Intellectual Property for the US Chambers of Commerce has been putting pressure on the US administrations to push India to tighten its IPR regime. IPR has been flagged as the biggest concern that the US has with India during the trade policy review.

♤ The main difference between the two sides stems from the fact that while the US sees IPR purely from the commercial point of view, India sees it as a development measure.

♤ In its Special 301 report, 2017, the United States Trade Representative’s office said: Despite positive statements and initiatives upon which the Modi Administration has embarked, the pace of reform has not matched high-level calls to foster innovation and promote creativity. India has yet to take steps to address longstanding patent issues that are affecting innovative industries. The report retained the India under the priority watch list.

♤ In 2016 the US raised the issue at the WTO. What the US and the EU have against India’s intellectual property legislation is a particular provision (Section 3(d) of Indian Patents act ) which allows the Indian Patents Controller to deny patents on items that are not significantly different from their older versions. This prevents pharmaceutical majors from getting fresh patents on medicines with expired patents by making just cosmetic changes in its formulation.

♤ The US and Switzerland are also pushing the WTO for allowing ‘non-violation’ complaints on TRIPS-related issues which would mean that complaints could be lodged on IPR matters even if the multilateral pact is not violated.

♤ Many developing countries, on the other hand, want a Ministerial decision of excluding such disputes permanently.

♤ New Delhi has teamed up with Brazil, China and South Africa to initiate a discussion on a recent report by a high level UN panel on access to medicines that stresses on the importance of using flexibilities in the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) pact to achieve the objective.

♤ New Delhi is also holding on to its right-to-issue compulsory licences for manufacture of copies of patented drugs to address situations of national emergency, another flexibility that the TRIPS pact allows.

♤ There is a clear divide between developed and developing countries on their reaction to the UN report on the issue with Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Bolivia, supporting the panel’s recommendations and the EU, Switzerland, Japan and South Korea criticising it for being “narrow in scope’’.