India may be better known as a perpetrator than a victim of intellectual property abuses. But the growing international reach of its companies has resulted in many of them falling victim to piracy in other countries
Not long ago, few people would have given much thought to the intellectual property protection of Indian assets. Indian products, after all, were not based on brand names but on cheap, high-volume manufacturing. Moreover, if India was mentioned in the same breath as IP, it was often in connection with violations of international IP rights. India appears on the latest IP watch list issued by the Office of the US Trade Representative. The other countries on the list are Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand and Venezuela.
But nowadays, Indian companies export value-added products with recognizable brands, patents and trademarks. Such companies, which were famously slow at protecting their intellectual property at home, now face the considerable challenge of managing and protecting international IP portfolios.
According to the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), India submitted just 1,070 international patent applications in 2009. This figure is dwarfed by the 53,000 patents that the US applied for and the nearly 30,000 from Japan. Even China, the fifth-most prolific patent applicant in the world, made 7,946 applications.
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