The government has decided to reconsider the aspects of the Bill that seeks to enable the universities and research institutions to patent government-funded research, before it is tabled in the Parliament. The Public Funded R & D (protection, utilisation and regulation of intellectual property) Bill, 2007, popularly known as the Indian Bayh Dole, was scheduled to be taken up in this session. The Bill is based on a corresponding US legislation introduced in 1980 that changed the patent landcape there.
There are still too many bureaucratic controls in the Bill, which must be adequately addressed, said Kapil Sibal, the science and technology minister.
The clauses, which may be reconsidered, include those that mandate the research institutes to hand out exclusive licence inventions resulting from government funding only to local entities. The current draft requires the authorised licence provider to dole out the licence on the condition that the licensee will substantially manufacture the resulting product on Indian soil. According to analysts, in the backdrop of markets for technology and products being globalised, the buyer of licences should be given broadest possible range of options to develop the technology and commercially launch it in the market. By forcing the industry players to manufacture the patented product locally, the technology may not be put to the best use (in the event of local manufacturing conditions remaining unattractive) or result in a product launch much more expensive than in an efficient location outside of India
The Bill grants the research institutions the right to patent inventions resulting from government funding, enabling them to licence such inventions to businesses, receive royalties which may then be invested in further research. Currently, such patent rights are held by government with a few exceptions of researchers in select autonomous institutions like IITs and IIS. The Bill intends to provide incentives to recipients of government funding to work with industry players to commercialise basic research.
Although the Bill figured on the agenda of the Cabinet last Thursday, Sibal preferred a thorough review of the policy framework before a final decision on the issue is taken. Paying heed to the concerns that have been raised in several quarters and refuting claims that the Bill has not been made available for public debate, Sibal said that the bill will discussed thoroughly in public domain before it turns into an Act.
There are also other provisions envisaged in the Bill that led the experts, industry and NGOs to protest. According to the current draft, if a research institution wishes to patent an invention, it must make a declaration to the government agency within a period of 90 days of the ?disclosure? of the invention, failing which such rights will go to the government. The researcher is entitled to a minimum of 30% of royalties earned out of licensing of the patent. However if the university of the researcher doesn?t go for patent rights and government chooses to retain such rights, it isn?t clear whether the researcher will still be entitled for his share of royalties.
Shamnad Basheer of Oxford IP research centre feels in the current draft an inventor has no say in whether or not his/her invention is best left in the public domain. Instead, it is for the government-funding agency to decide the fate of the technology in question. He adds the Bill assumes that industry will not invest in university research unless such research is patented and then exclusively licensed to industry. However, in a few cases, particularly when the technologies stand for larger public good deserve wider dissemination, the Bill needs to encourage non-exclusive licensing.
The total number of patents filed from India under World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) dropped to 686 in 2007 from 831 in 2006. That represented a decline of 17.45%. India retained the 20th position among countries it had in 2006.