Intellectual property rights (IPR) have always been a thorny issue for India, be it in terms of enforcing patent protection against piracy or preventing its own age-old processes and products from being usurped as modern-day inventions or discoveries. Francis Gurray, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (Wipo), on his first visit to the country where he met senior civil servants and called on the Prime Minister (PM), discusses his plans to work with India and its intellectual property system. Edited excerpts:
IP facilitator: Wipo’s Gurray says intellectual property can be used to incentivize innovation in green technology. Rajkumar / Mint
What is the aim of your visit?
The objective is to discuss the agenda at Wipo, what’s happening at the organization, what are the issues and the various areas in which we cooperate directly, for instance traditional knowledge or the exchange of patent data for databases, and in that capacity I have had the opportunity of meeting the PM. So it’s an opportunity to discuss all the current issues and to arrive at an understanding of what are the concerns in particular to India and where India thinks the organization should be going.
Recently, our member-states reached a decision, which was a major step forward for us to start text-based negotiations to establish an international legal instrument that will ensure effective protection to traditional knowledge (TK).
Since India already has its Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL), how is Wipo looking to leverage that?
It is a very important and fine product that is being produced by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. It is a product that can make available to patent offices around the world on a confidential basis...detail of traditional knowledge to assist in preventing the granting of patents over that traditional knowledge by unauthorized parties. It is also a basis on which to establish potential collaborative arrangements with private sector or industry to actually use the traditional knowledge in practice. I hope to also collaborate with India to lead a process of establishing similar TKDLs using its approach in other developing countries that wish to use this methodology.
What is the legal framework you are planning for TK?
You have the international architecture—what you must do, can’t do and so on. It would mean probably (it has to be negotiated)…, but typically it would be establishing an obligation on part of countries to provide protection against misappropriation of traditional knowledge. So it would have to be made an offence to misappropriate traditional knowledge and countries would have to agree that they would do that. Then we would define misappropriation and traditional knowledge, as also the acts of misappropriation and so on. In December this committee will meet and commence the negotiations and in principle they have to come up with some form of result in two years.