National
Call to revamp IPR regime
By P. Sunderarajan
LUCKNOW, JAN. 6. The Director General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), R.A. Mashelkar, has called for a total revamp of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime on the ground that the system did not provide adequate patent protection to farmers, artisans and other innovators in the informal sector as also innovations that dealt with animate objects - such as plants and animals.
Delivering a lecture at the Indian Science Congress, he said the time had come to revisit the industrial property systems that were set up centuries ago for inanimate objects and that too in the formal systems of innovations. ``The emerging challenge is to look at the systems that will deal with animate objects and informal system innovation (such as those by grassroots innovators such as farmers artisans, tribes and fishermen.)''
The standard intellectual property systems would certainly not suit such innovators and innovations. The CSIR Director General also called for certain changes in the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement as there was lack of clarity under the agreement with regard to the kind of legal instruments that could be used to enforce differential pricing between the developed and developing countries. This was one of the options suggested by advocates of patenting to ensure that everyone had access to patented drugs.
Though researchers argued that there was no clear relationship between patents and the prices of medicines, there was strong evidence that the average pharmaceutical product prices declined with the advent of generic drugs, he said. It was important to recognise that the principal objective of the GATT/WTO system was to promote free trade and, consequently, opportunities for competition must be provided across the nation on a non-discriminatory basis. The TRIPS agreement should be interpreted in this context alone.
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