Seal of Exclusivity

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In order to help Indian companies move up the IP ladder, firms like Ocean Tomo are looking at bringing into India services like IP exchanges, indexes, mutual funds focused only on innovation and IP asset trading, insurance, ratings, live and online IP auctioning. The focus is on trading in patents as they dominate other forms of IP, being more understandable, more tangible with design barriers, easier to track and protect.

In Bangalore, Ocean Tomo recently held a live simulcast of a unique auction held in Amsterdam — that of IP assets in different categories. The firm has a Patent Ratings platform that has already analysed all the over four million US patents and now wants to evaluate the quality of Indian patents.

“Such tools will be critical for corporations, academia as well as the government to determine the quality of intellectual property. We hope to collaborate with the government of India to establish such metrics for the future,” Nag said.

Information technology

According to the Evalueserve report, even pharmaceutical companies that did better than auto and IT companies in patent filings at IPO, did not have the foresight to increase their number of foreign filings. Though Indian IT companies have very good revenues to show, they have not translated a good portion of these to increase their patent filings.

During January 2005-December 2007, Microsoft filed 908 published patent applications at the IPO, while IBM had 404 and Oracle 108. Hold that up against Indian IT major TCS, which had just 35 IPO published patent applications during the same period, while Infosys Technologies had only 29. But Satyam Computer Services had filed just two patent applications, and Wipro Technologies did not file any patent applications at all, the report pointed out.

Sheetal Chopra, intellectual property rights expert and senior assistant director, Ficci, said this was because there are very few innovation-based Indian software companies, as most of them are into outsourcing or doing the work of their foreign clients. Besides, there is a lack of clarity in the country’s legislation about software patenting. As a result, software companies have no choice but to choose the copyright or trade secrets route to protect their IP, she said.

Pharmaceuticals