Mumbai: A patent and intellectual property rights Bill modelled on a 1980 Act of the US Congress and due to be tabled in the Parliament’s December session is drawing criticism from researchers and academics for not addressing key issues and jeopardizing public interest.
Listen to Professor Shamnad Basheer of the National University of Juridical Sciences talk about the Bayh Dole bill and its implications for Indian industry
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The proposed Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property (IP) Bill—sometimes referred to by its detractors as India’s Bayh-Dole Act, which was co-sponsored by then US senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole—will allow government laboratories and universities to protect and own inventions and discoveries, in anticipation that this will boost commercial applications of their research. It also provides for sharing revenue on such inventions with the scientists involved.
“The Bill really does not cater appropriately to public interest concerns in a meaningful way. It ought to have normative statements favouring the creation of innovations that serve the public good,” says Shamnad Basheer, a patent law expert and the human resource development ministry-appointed new IP faculty at the National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.
The Bill was presented by the ministry of science and technology in the Rajya Sabha in January, before a draft was made available for public scrutiny.
The Bayh-Dole Act in the US also allowed federally funded scientific institutions and universities ownership rights to the intellectual property on their inventions and transfer those rights to industries. Until then, such rights rested with the federal government, making technology transfer to industry difficult.
The Indian Bill is currently with a parliamentary committee, and is expected to go through with a few changes, said a senior official at the ministry of science and technology. Such committees are constituted to study Bills that have already been cleared by the cabinet.
In its current form, the draft Bill does not address why such legislation is required, nor does it address the actual issues that Indian scientific institutions face, such as a lack of focused research, the absence of effective technology transfer programmes, and the bureaucracy involved in taking inventions forward, its detractors say. Safeguarding the public interest is meant to be the aim of government-funded research in India, they say.
The Bill also lacks safeguards to ensure that exclusive licensing of publicly funded technologies does not create a market monopoly for private players.
According to the National Knowledge Commission, which originally recommended such a law, the Bill will help unlock the value of the country’s publicly funded research outputs. About 75% of Indian research and development activities are funded by the state, according to data from the ministry of science and technology.