FICCI - EPO - IPO Programme on Prosecuting And Litigating Patents In Europe And India, October 24, 2008

I recently presented a session on 'Software Patenting in India' on a workshop organized by FICCI, The European Patent Office and the Indian Patent Office. It was a nice experience to present at such a forum. The other co-presenters in the session were Mr. Richard Howson, Partner, Kilburn & Strode, and Dr. Pinaki Ghosh, IPR Head, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
In the session, the current state of software patenting in India and Europe was discussed. I also presented some recent trends related to software patenting in the Indian Patent Office. The presentation can be downloaded from this link

Coverage of my Indian IP paper in EPO and PIUG newsletter

I feel proud in telling that my whitepaper on "Patenting landscape in India" has been selected to be published in the newsletters of European Patent Office(EPO) and Patent Information Users Group (PIUG).

The EPO article will be published in Patent Information News 3/2008, which should be online by about 22 September. You can access it at the following link: http://www.epo.org/about-us/publications/patent-information/news/2008.html

The PIUG article will be published in Fall 2008 issue (http://www.piug.org/newsletter.php).

Prior to this the paper has received coverage in Managing IP, Live Mint (the Wall Street Journal), Rediff, Business Standard, IAM Magazine, TMC Net, SSRN, and Pluggd.in

From:

management@ssrn.com [management@ssrn.com]

Sent:

Sun 07-Sep-08 2:32 PM

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India far behind China in patent filings, needs 5 years to catch up

LiveMint.com The Wall Street Journal

http://www.livemint.com/2008/07/02001943/India-far-behind-China-in-pate.html
Posted: Wed, Jul 2 2008. 12:19 AM IST
China got 245,161 applications against India’s 35,000 last year; but some warn not to read too much into it

Bhuma Shrivastava

New Delhi: Patent filings in India were one-seventh of the number in China last year and have just scratched the level achieved by the neighbour as long as 10 years ago, according to a study by global analytics firm Evalueserve, which says the gap will remain for up to five years more.

The report also recommends that India introduce a new class of 10-year patents—half the normal lifetime—that will attract lesser scrutiny and encourage smaller domestic companies to seek patents, a suggestion spurned by public health advocates who don’t want the bar lowered.

Indian patent offices received more than 35,000 applications across sectors in 2007-08—up 21% from the preceding year and a more than three-fold increase during the last six years. In China, the number of patent applications last year reached 245,161.

“Indian companies lag substantially in patent-filing intensity compared with their Chinese counterparts,” Evaluserve said. Filing of invention patent applications in India was at about the same level as in China in 1997, “thereby lagging behind China by a decade”. It predicts India will need 4-5 years to catch up.

China’s manufacturing sector is largely responsible for the country’s lead over India in patent filings, said Ram Deshpande, senior manager for intellectual property in Evalueserve’s Shanghai office.

“India has seen a lot more investment in the services sector which doesn’t need patents,” Deshpande said. According to him, the question boils down to how innovative Indians are in the manufacturing sector.

The chemicals and pharmaceuticals sector constituted the biggest bulk of patent filings in India. Patenting activity in the information technology sector was 115 times lower.

China is also faster in granting patents. China’s timeline of 22.5 months for a 20-year-patent grant compares with 3-5 years in India, mainly due to the absence of pre-grant or post-grant opposition in China, which merely allows patent invalidation proceedings. China has more than 2,000 patent examiners, compared with 240 in India.

Some caution that too much shouldn’t be read into the statistics.

“The numbers are important to a certain extent but beyond that they don’t say a lot,” said Amit Sengupta, a health affairs activist and secretary of the Public Health Movement. “They don’t tell you the quality of patents filed, the way local patent laws are defined or the number of patents actually granted.”

China is a bigger economy with a larger industrial base and had a headstart in introducing the product patent regime over India, which got on board fully only in January 2005. And unlike India, China allows the patenting of new uses of an existing product.

The real concern for India is that domestic companies are not filing enough patent applications in their own country, said Deshpande.

Chinese companies make up 62% of patent applications filed in that country. In 2005-06, Indian companies accounted for just 20% of the applications in India, with foreign entities making up the remainder.

Only 22 “pure-bred” Indian organizations figured in the list of top 200 Indian filers.

“Indian companies are going to lose out in the long run. Patents that we think are inconsequential right now may come to bite us later,” warned Deshpande.

Indian companies and researchers could benefit a lot more from “cross-licensing” if they had their own bunch of patents that would act “as a protective shield” while negotiating with global companies, he said.

To encourage domestic companies and research institutes to seek patents, the Evalueserve report has recommended “utility model patents” that attract a smaller patent fee, lesser scrutiny from patent examiners and grant a monopoly right only for 10 years, as in Japan, Germany and China.

Public Health Movement’s Sengupta says it won’t work. “One first needs to prove that patents spur research and only then can we talk about 10-year patents. Evidence is not clear on the first assumption itself,” he said.

“Moroever, we run the risk of protecting innovations that don’t fulfil the basic tenets of patentability as per our law.”

Rawat, Balwant and Saluja, Navtej, "Patenting Landscape in India" (June 20, 2008). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1148671

The Hindu Business Line : India way behind China in filing patent applications
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blnus/14251916.htm

India way behind China in filing patent applications- Policy-Economy-News-The Economic Times

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/Economy/India_way_behind_China_in_filing_patent_applications/articleshow/3164673.cms

25 Jun, 2008, 1847 hrs IST, PTI

NEW DELHI: India and China might be the competing economic giants globally, but when it comes to innovation, the land of dragon is way ahead, filing nearly seven times more patent applications compared to our country. According to global research and analytics firm Evalueserve, India filed 35,000 patent applications during the fiscal year 2007-08, whereas China had more than 2.45 lakh applications in 2007. About 35,000 patent applications were filed at the Indian Patent Office (IPO) during the 2007-08 fiscal year, which is an increase of 21 per cent compared to the previous year. Once granted, these patents have a validity of 20 years from their filing date. However, the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) received a total of 245,161 20-year patent applications in 2007. "This made China the third most prolific patent-filing country in the world after the United States and Japan. Patent filing has been growing both in India and China at about 20 per cent per year. However, the SIPO received approximately the same number of 20-year applications in 1997 as the IPO did in 2007-08. This implies that India is approximately 10 years behind China," Evalueserve said. In 2007, filings by domestic applicants in China accounted for 62.4 per cent of the 20-year patent applications with the SIPO. During the same period, the year-on-year increase in domestic 20-year patent application filing in China was at 25 per cent, whereas that of foreign filings stood at 4.5 per cent.

The Hindu Business Line : Chinese cos increase domestic patent filing

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2008/06/21/stories/2008062151261000.htm

Huawei files for 60 patents, ZTE Corporation for 52

Priyanka Vyas
Thomas K. Thomas

New Delhi, June 20 Chinese companies, often lambasted for selling low cost and copycat goods in India, are increasing the number of patents they file in the domestic market.

Telecom and wireless communication companies such as Huawei Technologies, ZTE Corporation, Inventec (a notebook original design company) and FMCG giant Haier are some of the Chinese companies that have been filing patents locally.

Huawei Technologies that filed 60 patents, according to recent records at the Indian patent office, has been granted six from 2005 onwards. In the same period, ZTE Corporation, which filed 52, received three from the patent office. The other two players, Inventec and Haier, have filed a lesser number — five and three respectively — and have both received one each till now.

“We have two ways of filing a patent in India. One way is by PCT (patent cooperation treaty) application, the other is through the Paris Convention application. Currently, we have very few patents issued in India. While globally, last year, 7,693 patent applications were filed by the company, whether any of these should be applied in India depends on the market environment,” said a spokesperson for Huawei. The company, on an average, files 45-50 patent applications annually from its India R&D centre.

Realising market potential

According to data available at the Indian patent office, the number of patents that were first filed in India from the Republic of China increased from 32 to 45 in the financial year 2006-07. Patents filed in India that had been filed previously in another country rose to 80 from 64.

The highest surge was in the category of PCT applications that stood at 184 in 2006-07, from 132 the year earlier. PCT is a patent law treaty that allows individuals or companies to file applications at an international level, which after being examined is sent to the member countries who then grant it in their jurisdiction.

“Undeniably, Chinese companies recognise the potential of the Indian market by either importing goods or manufacturing here. And the only way to tap the market is by filing patents,” admitted Mr Navtej Saluja, Vice-President, Intellectual Property Research and Legal Process Services, Evalueserve, a data tracking firm.

However, though the number of Chinese companies filing here is growing, they are yet to be ranked among the top 15 foreign players who do so. But as these companies go global, their overseas filings would increase, said Mr Saluja.

Related Stories:
Domestic cos shy away from keeping patents ‘in force’
Patent lessons from China

Patenting Trends in India Facts and Figures

A presentation delivered on the occasion of World IP Day Seminar at FICCI
Presentor: Dr. Navtej Saluja , Vice President, Evalueserve

Daiichi Sankyo gets a patent advantage
Business Standard
Joe C Mathew / New Delhi June 15, 2008, 4:49 IST

Apart from a five per cent share of the Indian pharmaceutical market, the purchase of Ranbaxy will take Daiichi Sankyo way ahead of others in the race among Indian companies for patent-protected drugs.

A recent paper on ‘Patenting Landscape in India' by Evalueserve shows that Ranbaxy alone accounts for over 23 per cent of the total medicine patent applications filed by major domestic companies in India.

The percentage could be as high as 34 if the patent applications submitted by Orchid, in which Ranbaxy has 14.5 per cent, is added.

The Evalueserve study found that Ranbaxy led the group of top 200 patent filers in the period 2005-07 with 320 applications, followed closely by Dr Reddy's with 315 applications. Orchid comes third with 149 patent applications.

By zeroing in on Ranbaxy, Daiichi has managed to get control over the two most aggressive patent filers in the Indian pharmaceutical industry.

"Though applications need not mean grant of patents, the trend is obvious. Daiichi, which does not figure among the top 200 patent applicants in the India office, will lead the race for acquiring patent protection for future medicines," a Mumbai-based patent expert said.

According to him, the data is a clear indication of how acquisitions of Indian companies can be related to intellectual property issues.

Foreign pharmaceutical companies have been way ahead of their Indian counterparts when it comes to patent applications. The Evalueserve study said that Ranbaxy was 37th in the list of top 50 patent filers during 2005-07.

Multinational companies like Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, Sanofi Aventis, Novartis, Merck and Roche have all filed more patent applications than Ranbaxy in India.

The Evalueserve study said the patent-filing trend of the top nine Indian pharmaceutical companies was interesting. The companies showed a marked difference in focus with respect to different patent jurisdictions.

Some filed for more international patents, while others chose India. The study also said that if international patent applications were also considered, Ranbaxy's numbers were more than four times those of Dr Reddy's.

New survey reveals India's patenting deficit

Intellectual Asset Management Magazine
12 June 2008
Joff Wild, IAM Magazine

Hot on the heels of its report on patenting in China, research company Evalueserve has turned its attention to India. The result is a fascinating insight into what is happening in the world’s largest democracy. It also shows that, unlike their Chinese equivalents, Indian companies have yet to get to grips with their country’s patent system – something that may not bode well for the ongoing development of the Indian economy.
The report shows that, while there has been a significant increase in filings at the Indian Patent Office, only 20 of the top 200 applicants between 2005 and 2007 were Indian companies. The top 10 local patent filers (with their position within the top 200 in brackets) are:
1. Council of Scientific Industrial Research (CSIR) – 1,523 published applications (1)
2. Ranbaxy Laboratories – 320 published applications (37)
3. Dr Reddy’s Laboratories – 315 published applications (38)
4. Indian Institutes of Technology – 237 published applications (47)
5. Bharat Heavy Electricals – 189 published applications (59)
6. Orchid Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals – 149 published applications (67)
7. Cadila Healthcare – 148 published applications (69)
8. Cipla – 138 published applications (70)
9. Steel Authority of India – 136 published applications (71)
10. Larsen & Toubro – 123 published applications (72)

But many in the top 10 have filed very few applications outside India. For example, between them, the 10 have filed 576 applications at the USPTO, but 356 of these were from the CSIR alone. At the EPO, the total was 552 applications, of which 434 came from CSIR and Ranbaxy. On the PCT front, there were 1,066 applications, almost al of them made by CSIR and the pharmaceutical companies. By contrast, the top 10 Chinese companies between January 2005 and December 2007 had a combined 20,051 published SIPO applications. That said, foreign filings were also comparably very low.
Towards the end, the report makes a couple of very telling observations:
• In 2007, there were 245,161 invention patent applications filed at the SIPO, of which domestic applicants filed more than 62.4%. In contrast, a total of 24,505 applications were filed at the IPO in 2005–06, of which domestic applicants filed 4,855 (approximately 20%) and foreign applicants filed 19,650 (approximately 80%) applications.
• Further, during this period, the year-on-year increase in domestic invention patent application filing in China was 25%, whereas that of foreign filings was only 4.5%. This is a clear indication of increasing awareness of patent application filing among domestic Chinese companies. In contrast … while the number of applications filed by foreign applicants in India has risen steeply (with an annual growth of 77%), the growth in patent application filing by domestic applicants is substantially less (approximately 20%). This low growth may be ascribed to the lack of awareness among domestic Indian companies with respect to patents and the value strong patent portfolios would provide to them.

It seems to me that if India is to fulfil her undoubted potential and truly become a 21st century powerhouse, Indian companies need to start learning a lot more about patents starting today.

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