By: M.c. Linthoingambee
The Intellectual Property Rights are certain areas brought abut to make amends for safeguarding right with effective statutes, bodies and various other institutes. India still has a long way to go because the Constitution of India has not expressly mentioned its father clause of providing measures and protection to these rights. But are Indian inventors, writers, singers, composers, etc protected? Yes, we have existing statutory legislations to grant refuge to the above mentioned. We can say the sky is the limit for these areas of law is put under constant corrections and amendments for improvements. China and India competes hand in hand for new status of population explosion ranked in the first and second respectively and now they have more to compete for with the congressional caucus moderating and claiming these two countries as the perpetrators to Intellectual Property Rights with China moving the violation percentage of Intellectual Property Rights at 73 per cent followed by India at 60 per cent. The out
come of these discoveries has led even the US to keep a close watch on the Intellectual property violations of these two countries and a few others. That’s the silver platter just being opened to the ideology. India for example, has one the highest percentage of producing generic medicines and tag lined for counterfeiting of goods.
The piracy rates on Intellectual Property Rights has by far exceeded in heaving way for hoarding huge amount of black money which are used for unwanted activities. The shops in and out of Delhi in the country have their fair share of pirated copies of software, programs, books, movies, etc. We see more pirated copies of computer programs being sold for a lesser price which is befitting to the many college going students who happen to be main users of these programs. And we have even paid witness to pirated books being sold in the open at various street stalls even before its release. For popular books like Harry Potter, more copies get sold in the black market to meet to the demands of its buyers. Let’s face it! It’s better to earn a little more for a common street vendor under such circumstances to go by in a day. But all these do not necessarily get recorded in the good books as perpetrating a certain right attained or given to an author or an inventor must be respected and not violated in the hope of earning a little extra black money. Certain measures need special attention but a little cross story runs in the family.
There are boundaries to target the recourse and we are often at a loss for words. But India has certain exceptions to these violations. India being a poor country unlike most is the major provider of generic medicines at a cheaper rate than those heavily tag with expensive price tags. For a person suffering with the ailments of cancer or HIV/AIDS it is better for them to use a cheaper medicine which comes under their budget rather than expensive treatments. For each person that suffers in Africa or a backward country, India has been one of the chief providers of generic medicines with its pharmaceutical industry battling to find new processes and products which have the same properties, chemical components and medicinal value of an originally patented product. Keeping aside the unsettled chapters of a diary, the issues of patent and copyright has constantly been coming in the limelight although one might add that it’s a shame India does not have patent over the famously consumed Basmati Rice which originated from India itself. We need to go and take back what’s rightfully ours.
Unfortunately, there is only a handful of legal experts or persons dealing entirely in the field of Intellectual Property Rights in the country. So, innovators might lose hope of inventing newer and inventive step of a new creation which might be industrially applicable and fit for use in counting the economic benefits. Once there was a story of great copyright piracy protective measures that happened around the time of 2001 which my teacher recounted with me, where it was a major one of a kind thing for the first time in Indian cinema history that the legal representative of the movie filed a suit against anonymous for selling pirated copies of the movie even before its released. It was a story of the shocking producer who had to predict the fundamentals and outcomes of going ahead with the suit. It was a tough choice but if we want to stop the evils of piracy that is spreading like an unwanted cold has to be tackled with new tactics. A few inventive measures only come into place once in our times. The Jaylalitha Government in Tamil Nadu also took up an initiative to place a statute in order called the Goonda Act to act as a mechanism to inflict the characters of being a ‘goonda’ which means a thug in Hindi to battle and fight the evils of copyright piracy in the state as a whole.
At the end of the day, we are just claiming for the true purpose of a creator to be exercised effectively which may occur in the form of designs, geographical indication, copyright, patent, circuit designs, etc. Necessity is the mother of inventions and maybe we did right in naming something like the nuclear designs of not coming under the authority of patentable inventions. That’s a tight stuff of the back but we need more and more inventions which may befit the role of attaining and safeguarding humanity but not destroy them in the process. Let’s face it at the end of the day everyone wants a level playing field to exchange the ides and inventions of Intellectual property and we must give them that wonder stage.
Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/08/the-creators-protection/