The Hindu Business Line : Nations must innovate, patent IPRs

"NO developing nation can survive unless it can sell something to some other nation and to do so most effectively in a technology-oriented world, it would be imperative to focus on issues veering around Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) and technology management."

Stating this at a workshop on IPR & Technology Management, organised here by the Sponsored Research & Industrial Consultancy (SRIC) unit of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT-KGP), Prof K.L. Chopra, a former Director of the institute and Professor Emeritus of IIT, Delhi, stressed upon the imperatives for a holistic and seamless method of managing technology.

He said nations must innovate and patent intellectual property. "It's bad news for nations that do not innovate, for, in the era of technology, copyrights, trademarks and patents, intellectual might will be legally right." As such, it would auger well for nations and companies to file for their own patents instead of fighting legal battles later in their endeavour to prove that someone else has patented their inventions.

According to him, society has begun to accept that innovations do have a commercial potential. "Earlier, patents were sold in thousands of dollars. Today, they are sold in millions and even billions of dollars," Prof Chopra said, adding that 90 per cent of the patents were of no use. Of the remaining 10 per cent, a mere 2 per cent finds commercial application.

He said research & development and learning just for the sake of it were of no good to society. The need of higher education was not just to create knowledge but create such knowledge which "connects with society for the greater good".

In his address, the Director of IIT-KGP, Prof Shishir K. Dube, lamented the lack of knowledge of IPR issues in industry and called for awareness creation towards this end. Last year, he said, India filed only 4,000 applications for patents compared with over 90,000 patent applications filed by China.

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