Intellectual Property is still a strange beast in this country. People eye it rather warily, uncertain of its temperament (how hard will it bite or is it the clawing sort?) and the hidden threat in its still unfolding contours.
To familiarise businessmen with this creature, industry organisations have been doing a fair amount of spadework -- organising seminars, workshops and talks by visiting experts. It was only towards the end of 2006, however, that such events became high-profile, regular and more widespread.
That's when Dominic Keating of the US Patent & Trademark Office began functioning as First Secretary (IP) at the US embassy in Delhi.
He put together a small team, one lawyer, IP specialist Sanjit Kaur Batra, and two assistants, and made it an evangelist station for spreading the light on IPR or intellectual property rights. He forged an alliance with the Confederation of Indian Industry to make IPR as much of a talking point with businessmen as value added tax, another much-distrusted concept some years ago, and appears to have succeeded to a large extent.
He also began reaching out to sections of society one would normally not both with -- schoolkids and housewives -- to allow the idea of IPR to take root in a country which the developed world considers as rather lax on the issue.
The overarching theme of such conclaves, many of them organised in concert with prominent American universities, is that protecting IPR creates wealth and transforms economies but if you came to brass tacks it was invariably about combating piracy and counterfeit goods. But the US evidently has more long-term goals in view.
In December of that year India and the US signed a memorandum of understanding to further cooperation on IP rights, the focus being on the training of personnel with a view "to strengthening the working of the IP systems in the two countries".
Much of the effort has gone into training our patent examiners, an issue that is threatening to become a hot potato for Delhi.
Over the past year and a half, the USPTO has provided long-term courses for about a dozen patent examiners, apart from week-long courses for sundry others from the customs officials, police and the registrar of copyrights to the judiciary on the technicalities of the American patent system. Even a judge of the Delhi high court has been taken to the USPTO for a short-term
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