Filing of patent and trademark applications can now be filed from anywhere in the world at any time through Internet, with the Centre launching the e-filing facility on Friday. This move would help the Indian Patent and Trade Mark Offices function as paperless offices.
Payments can also be made through the Payment Gateway of authorised bankers, which would save time and money and the hassles involved in visiting and filing the applications in the offices.
The modules for the e-filing and on-line processing have been developed by the National Informatics Centre.
The payment gateway is currently provided by the State Bank of India. The facility was launched by commerce and industry minister Kamal Nath here. Ashwani Kumar, minister of state for industry was also present on the occasion.
To enhance the prestige of the IPO and may attract work from abroad, Nath said the next step is making Indian Patent Office an International Search Authority and an Internation-al Preliminary Examining Authority under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
Application for this will be filed with the World Intellectual Property Organisation this month itself, he informed. Currently, there are only 12 such authorities.
“India is also at an advanced stage of joining the Madrid Protocol on Trade Marks. The Bill for making the changes necessary in the Trade Mark law will be introduced in the forthcoming session of the Parliament. Madrid Protocol is a simple, facilitative and cost-effective system for registration of International Trademarks. India’s membership of the Madrid Protocol will help Indian companies to register their trade marks in the member countries of the Protocol through a single application”, the Minister further stated.
Providing details of the programme, Nath informed that a major programme of modernization of the infrastructure of Intellectual Property Offices of India costing Rs.153 crore was implemented during the 10th Five Year Plan.
Computerization has been one of the key components of the modernization initiatives. As part of this, facilities have been created for e-filing of Patent and Trademark applications. There are only a dozen or so countries which have e-filing facilities at present and India now gets into this elite group consisting of countries like USA, Japan, South Korea, China and the European Patent Office.