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IPR protection `weak' in India

By Sridhar Krishnaswami

WASHINGTON MAY 2. The United States has continued to place India in the priority watch list after the annual review of "Special 301'' that examined the adequacy of intellectual property rights protection in 74 countries.

The Special 301 report has stressed that Washington will consider a range of options including but not limited to initiation of dispute settlement consultations with countries that have not fully implemented their obligations under the WTO Agreement pertaining to trade related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. In the watch list are Argentina, Bahamas, Brazil, European Union, India, Indonesia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Poland, Russia and Taiwan. This year the United States Trade Representative (USTR) had paid specific attention to the issue of growing counterfeiting and piracy with emphasis on an ongoing campaign to reduce production of unauthorised copies of "optical media'' such as CDs, VCDs, DVDs and CD-ROMs. The Bush administration has contended that India's protection of intellectual property continued to be `weak' even if there were "some tenuous first signs'' that the situation may be changing as a result of the passage of the patent law amendments in May of last year. "However, this law still appears to contain several TRIPS inconsistencies'', the report says in the section on India. "In addition, piracy of copyrighted works remains a problem, particularly popular fiction works and certain textbooks, and protection of foreign trademarks remains difficult'', the USTR has said, going on to call on India to adopt `immediately' amendments to its copyright law, fully and correctly implementing the WIPO Internet Treaties and correcting TRIPS deficiencies in its protection of computer software. The USTR has also said that counterfeiting is rife in the Indian marketplace, especially in auto, pharmaceutical, consumer goods and apparel industries.

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