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New Delhi: It has been over 19 months since the government launched a programme asking domestic companies to register their intellectual property rights (IPRs) with the customs department to enable the authorities to seize counterfeited copies of those products and prevent them from entering the country. However, so far only 20 companies have registered a total of 200 products with the department. Alarmed by the poor response from India Inc, the government, along with the industry body Ficci would hold a series of countrywide workshops starting Friday to encourage companies to record their IPRs with the customs department. Companies from the pharmaceutical, consumer goods and software & electronics sectors would take part in the workshops. In this regard, the US, keen to thwart the import of any of the counterfeited products of American companies, is also lending a helping hand. In the US, however, companies have been filing paper applications of their IPRs with the customs department since the 1970s. The system them went online in the US from December 2005 onwards.
Since the US has a well-established system for several decades, the results also are better. Domestic value of merchandise seized in the US for IPR violations was $113.2 million in the first half of FY 2008 and the number of IPR seizures during this same time was 7,245. So far, the total number of IPR recordation with the US Customs is 23,661. In India, the proactive companies that have already dome the registration of their IPRs with customs authorities include the renowned ones like HUL, P&G, Sony, Siemens, Nokia and Mercedes Benz.
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