Brainiac IP Solutions is a firm helping national and multi-national companies in validating, protecting and enforcing IPR rights universally for growing revenues. It delivers the clients with excellent services in diverse sectors like patents, trademarks, industrial designs and copyrights. Suneet Sabale, CEO and Founder at Brainaic IP Solutions is an Indian patent practitioner and mechanical engineer having extensive experience working in the field of patent industry for more than 12 years. In conversation with him he shared his sights on the intellectual property and its significance of protection.
Intellectual Property (IP) protection has a long history. For the United Kingdom, one can trace its footprints way back from 14th Century, United States 17th Century and Japan 18th Century. 600 years back ruler of UK recognised intellectual creation and its importance of protection. Accordingly, we can also map the economic strength of these countries. All most of the developed nations have clear intellectual property law and good enforcement system to protect the rights. Even these countries have separate courts to handle IP related matters for expedite redressed. China started very late in IP. The first patent was filed in 1984 (as per our findings), but they moved very fast. China and India both signed international IP treaties in the same period. During initial days, the IP enforcement was not effective in Mainland China. This was used advantageously by the local manufacturers to increase their economic strength and for expansion. This financial and expanded manufacturing strength is being recognised by many OPE, and therefore today China is the number one destination for outsourcing of manufacturing activities.
After almost 30 years later China is ambitious enough to become number one economy of the world. Also, there is a significant rise in IP related matters which implies that they have good enforcement capabilities. Also, the Chinese government is making continuous efforts in improvising the rules. Since 2014 more than one lakh IP cases were filed in China, and a separate court has been established in major cities. This has made China number one country with respect to no. of patents filed per year. Around 4.5 million patents were filed by China in 2016.
On the other side, even after beginning the journey during the same period, India is left behind long way concerning the economy as well as in the number of patent filing. Still, as on date, 70-80% of the Indian patent filing is done by foreign companies. Majority of the Indian Companies started their IP activities after 2005. This means at least we are 70 years behind in comparison to foreign companies from US, Europe and Japan.
The question arises here – “Is it because of the government mechanisms or the public at large?”
India is the largest democratic nation with a population contributing to 37% of the world population and expected to be the number one country in the world by 2028. Even with such a vast population, we are not at par with countries like Taiwan 0.4% population, Israel 0.12% Population, Japan 1.7% population, Germany 1.1% population, the United States 4.1% regarding economic and technological development. Is the population becoming an obstacle by creating colossal competition to earn the primary livelihood, which sometimes forgets ethics? This is the source of all emerging shortcuts, influences, and other unnecessary activities rising above the competition leaving behind the real good portion of society. Is it the short vision that does not allow us to think in the long term? Or is it the laziness that people have acquired over the time trying different shortcuts, which have failed. Even if this is a picture at large, still a small portion of the population is working hard enough contributing to the economy. These are the few genuine taxpayers and government officials continuously working hard and pushing the nation ahead. For this category, though the number is a problem, it is insignificant.
The government is a democratically elected government has no option but to take populist decisions, which may not take us anywhere. Two years back Start-up India had become popular. An excellent initiative with a lot of funding’s assured by the government. Banks were assigned to release such base on various criterions. With a history of lousy loan debt, banks were not ready to fund beyond an absolute limit. Beyond that limit, collateral was asked by these banks which were logical in their perspective. They don’t want the rise in the number of defaulters. Further, facilitators were appointed to reduce the further financial burden on the Start-up. Moreover, here we emphasise more on cost-effective solutions rather than substantial solutions, which will save time and efforts, which is sometimes difficult to predict the success of a product in the market.
I think we run around the problem instead of solving the problems.
What is needed is a good overhauling of the population. A single invention of an individual will not make him a millionaire. Patenting cannot be compared with gambling. Consistency, correct efforts in a right direction will definitely fetch more significant results. Patenting is just a foundation on which an entire product line can be dependent sometimes. Patenting will not attract investors, but the right use, implementation and sound business model can lead to success or help in attracting investors. A futuristic vision, which can speculate where the industry will move in next 10-15 years will help is adopting correct R&D strategies and therefore patenting approach. We are in the era of fast-changing technology, where every year we see up gradation, and this is further reducing. If patents are applied for the technology that can be used now, then the patenting won’t fetch you any results. At least the technology implementation for which the patent is filed today should be 5 years ahead in future. If you are not able to think, at mapping competitors patent portfolio will give the direction in which the industry is moving, and accordingly, the R&D strategies can be implemented. With correction vision, realistic expectations, collective hard work will definite help us to bring the rise in technological development, indirectly resulting in the increase in the national economy.
Intellectual Property and its Importance for Economic Development.
