The Dolcera Blog

The US India IP conclave on Information technology organized at Taj Krishna, Hyderabad started on a low note with the news of death of YS Rajasekhara Reddy, Chief Minister Andhra Pradesh in helicopter crash on 3rd September 2009.
The two days event organized by CII (confederation of Indian Industry) in association with USPTO Global Intellectual Property academy soon started to blaze as reputed panelist, both Indian bureaucrats and members of US embassy started addressing the audience. Welcome address was given by Shakti Sagar, Vice Chairman CII_AP & MD ADP Inida Pvt LTd. Theme address was given by Dominic Keating, IPR Attaché where he applauded Indian IT industries for their contributions to Indian economy. He mentioned that IT business has grown from 150 million US $ in 1991 to 50 billion US$ in 2007 and is further expected to rise to 900 billion US $ by 2020. Hyderabad alone exports IT worth 163 billion US $ and has shown a growth of 323% from year 2002.

GS Ragahavender, Registrar of copyrights, Copyright office, Government of India in his key note address discussed about legislation, management and enforcement as three pillars to assure working of IP laws. Cornelis M Keur, Consul General, US Consulate admired Andhra Pradesh as third state after Maharashtra and Gujarat in terms of growth in Economy. Concluding remarks of the inaugural session was given by Dr. S Chakravarthy, IAS(R), Advisor-APTDC.

Soon after a short coffee break the conference resumed on special plenary: The digital dilemma: Intellectual property in the information age. Dr. A Garg, Director-IPR department of Information technology, Govt of India emphasized that SMEs (small and medium enterprises) has to play a leading role in innovation. Incubation parks, multiplier grand scheme, SIP-EIT (support international patent protection in electronics and IT) have been started by government to support innovation. Under SIP-EIT, a financial support of upto 50% of total patent processing cost including Attorney’s fees, patent office filling fees, examination fees, patent search cost and additional cost for entering national phase up to grant/issue will be given. The support will be in the form of reimbursement of expenses in actual to the applicant. Support will however be limited to Rs. 15 lakhs or 50% if the total incurred on filling each invention, whichever is less.

Prof M Sridhar Acharyulu, MHRD IP chair professior, NALSAR, Jennie Ness, Regional Inteleecual propery Attaché for South east Asia US embassy Bangkok and Madhukar Sinha, Prof-IPR, center for WTO studies, IIFT shared their knowledge on various dilemmas to be confront in the rapidly growing age of IT.

Third session on strategies for protection of incremental innovation and patentability of software: challenges for IT/software industry started after high-lunch. The session was mainly headed by corporate professionals enlightening on Indian, US and European laws on software patenting and copyrights. BLV Rao, VP- corporate affairs, Infotech enterprise Ltd initiated the session with a focus on incremental innovations. Dawn Jos, Pat Engg-Asia, Texas instrument was next speaker in the session. Himanshu Goswami, IP attorney, Microsoft India and Santanu Mukherjee, lead-IPR attorney, Qualcomm India discussed intrinsic details on IT and Indian patent article 3 (k), European article 52 (2), 52 (3) and US laws on software patenting.

Dominic Keating unfolded the legalities of patenting software and business methods in US. Anil Sharma, Knowledge scientist Dolcera took the stage and discussed one of the most talked about cases in US, “In re Bilski & its implications on software patents.” The presentation kindled interest amongst the audience from the word go. The talk showcased the research work that Dolcera had undertaken in collaboration with Medtronic in Bilski case and its impact on software, medical devices and pharma method patents.

The last session of the day was on open source software: who needs IP, was chaired by Venkatesh Hariharan, Director, corporate affairs, Redhat Asia-Pacific, Prof. KS Rajan, IIIT-Hyderabad and Pavan Duggal, leading advocate in the Supreme Court of India. The panelists presented their views on pros and cons of free software versus paid software in context of IP and public interest.

The conclave was a major success and big boost to the city of Hyderabad. The city being an IT hub and IPR industries and law firms already budding, conferences like such will enhance awareness amongst the professionals. Overall, the conclave was a great experience and CII - USPTO effort to increase IP awareness in India is definitely commendable.

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This is in continuation to my previous post on Patenting Landscape in India which could be read from the link given below
http://blogs.dolcera.com/blog/2009/07/18/patenting-landscape-in-india-a-view-on-patenting-trends-in-india-a-dolcera-analysis/

In this post the Analysis concentrates on finding the Top companies who have maximum publication in the Indian Patent Office. The Top Companies were searched for the patents published between 01st January 2005 -21st July 2009. The patents filed in all the 4 Indian Patent offices are considered

The Top 15 Companies

From the Graph one can conclude that Qualcomm leads in the race for Publications in the Indian Patent Office with 2118 publications followed by Philips Electronics and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. Qualcomm deals with electronics and communication products. Since India is a major market for Mobile/ Cell phone, Qualcomm has a good advantage for its patents filed in India to get protection for its inventions

The Top Indian Assignees

From the Graph one can see that Council of Scientific and Industrial Research(CSIR) is the Top Indian Assignee when it comes to publications in India with 1541 publications followed by Hindustan Unilever Ltd. with 523 publications. But CSIR still trails with Qualcomm and hence it is necessary to encourage more research to be the Top patent filer in India.

Of the Top 100 Companies that Dolcera has analysed, 8 Indian companies happen to be in it while the rest of them are Foreign companies. It means 92 % of the Top publications in India are by MNCs. This scenario should be looked upon since the domestic Patent filers in other countries like the US, Japan, China are neck to neck with the International Filers. This should be seriously be looked upon by Indian Companies since it shows that most Indian companies concentrate/Invest only a small part of their budget to R&D activities. The Indian Government should also encourage Indian Universities to carry out R&D activities so that India could become a recognized country in R&D developments.

-Anil Sharma

Knowledge Scientist

Dolcera

© Dolcera 2009, All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication should be copied without the permission from the authour or from Dolcera.

Disclaimer:  There can be manual errors and the author or the company(Dolcera) takes no responsibility for the damage caused due to the data provided.

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One of the latest decisions of the Indian Patent office to facilitate correspondences related to a patent application in electronic form to patent applicants for their ease. This step is a landmark achievement in the history of the Indian Patent Office and was a long felt need to the patent stakeholders.

The initiative was expected to begin on July 1. The Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, P H Kurian, said that the plan would take off later this month after the completion of all formalities. The notification directs the applicants and patent agents to provide their email ids at the time of filing the patent application for dispersing communication notices and examination reports, electronically.

This move will alleviate the burden of both the Patent Office and the applicants and would help speed up the processing of patent applications. “Introduction of electronic correspondence is a boon for stakeholders as it will ease the task of patent prosecution in India, especially for applicants residing in foreign countries,” FICCI’s Director General Amit Mitra said.

Source

Biplab Dey

Knowledge Scientist

Dolcera

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This is a report prepared on the basis of the Annual Report 07-08 provided by the Indian Patent office. This report provides us with an analysis of the patenting trends in the last five years (I.e From 2003-2008). The data for the analysis is taken from the Annual Report - 2007-08 provided by the Indian patent Office. This reports provides graphical representation of the trends followed in Indian patent office which gives us a better perspective of the progress made by the Indian Patent Office(IPO), the rise of patenting in various fields of inventions and major contributors to the patent filing trend in India.

Introduction

Indian Patent Office is functioning from its four branches located at Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai & Delhi. Kolkata Office is the Head Office. The Patent Office administers the law concerning protection of inventions in the country by way of grant of limited monopoly to the inventors or their assignees or legal successors. The Patents Act, 1970(as amended) governs the grant of patents.

Dolcera Analysis

1.1 Trends of patents in India:

The above trend was prepared based on the Annual report provided by the IPO. Go to IPO site to download the Annual report 2007-08

A.Patents Filed:

From the above graph one can easily find that there has been significant increase in the filing trend in the last five years. The number of applications for patents filed in 2007-2008 was 35,218 compared to 28,940 applications in 2006-2007 representing an increase of about 22 % in the filing. When one looks at the patents filing distribution in the year 2007-08, It’s a rather disappointing figure.

The above graph was taken from the IPO Annual Report 07-08.The number of applications for patents which originated in India were 6,040 contributing approximately 17% of the total number of applications filed during the year. The Major contribution comes from Maharashtra followed by Delhi, Tamilnadu and other states. Number of convention applications filed in 07-08 was 4453, Increased by about 41% over the 06-07 year’s total of 3165.

Majority of the foreign applications were filed through the PCT National Phase route. The number of such applications filed during the year 07-08 was 23,891 which was about 21% higher as compared with the previous year total of 19,768.The major contributor is USA followed by Germany, UK and other countries.

The Number of PCT applications have grown considerably in the last five years, the legal entity showing greater interest than the individuals.During the year 07-08 total filing was 707 as compared with 534 in the previous year, an increase of approximately 33%.Major contributors for the PCT international applications during the year were CSIR, Cadila Healthcare Ltd, Matrix Laboratories Ltd. Alembic Ltd., Jubilant Organizes, Starlight Optical echnologies Ltd. Pricol Ltd., Onmobile Global Ltd., Panacea Biotech Ltd., Reliance Life ciences Pvt. Ltd., Natco Pharma, hetero drugs Ltd., Ind- Swift Laboratories Ltd.

From all the above data it is eviden that the number of foreign patent applications is nearly 4 times that of the domestic patents filed in India. It also reflects that developed countries continue their interest in R&D activities and they ensure that their invention is protected in developing and a great consumer market like India.

B. Patents Examined:

The number of patents examined each year is not steady and has its ups and downs each year. One can easily observe that the number of patents examined fell in the years 05-06 and 07-08 as compared to the previous years.

This raises doubts on the conditions of the patent examinations in India. Its well known fact that there is a crunch of patent examiners in the IPO to examine the patents. Hence there is a need to recruit qualified patent examiners which will help remove the backlogs of the pending patent applications in India.

C. Patents Granted:

The number of patents granted has increased significantly in the last five years. The year 07-08 saw nearly double the patents granted as compared to the previous years.

1.2 Patents application and grant in various technology fields:

The above chart depicts which categories of patents are most sorted for application in India. As far as patent application is concerned Chemical, Mechanical and drugs patents have gained significantly in terms of their application in India while there is decline in patent applications related to Food, Electrical, Computer/Electronics and Biotechnology patents in the year 07-08. The major reason could be the recent recession period which had hit many sectors or it could be as a result of the Bilski case. The Others category which contains specialised field has seen a considerable rise in 07-08 ahead of other patent applications.

As far as grant of the patents goes the grant of the patents have increased considerably due to the efforts put by the IPO and due to amendments in Indian Patent ACT in 2002 and 2005 respectively which could be the reason for the increase in the grant of the patents in recent years.

The others field distribution is shown below. The IPO has classified it since these are specialised branches. The below analysis is for the others field distribution for the year 07-08

One can see that applications in the field of Physics, Communication and Biomedical contribute to 50% of the applications in the other specialised fields.

One can see that Biochemistry and Physics contribute to 50% of the patents granted in Others field, thus showing that new inventions are being made in these fields.

1.3 Conclusion:

Though significant steps are being taken by the Indian Government and the IPO to encourage patent application in India and improvement in the working of the IPO, we still are much behind then our neighbor China where the patent applications are said to have crossed US and Japan patent applications Source. What IPO needs is a better database where people can access patents easily similar to those patent database as USPTO and EPO, where patents documents can be easily downloaded and legal status of these documents can be accessed. Though Indian patent PDFs for application number 1-80000 are available but the patents after that are not available in full texts. Patents signify the Research activity in a nation. The number of domestic filings are very less and major applications are from foreign nationals which is a cause of concern since it shows that domestic R&D activities are not given enough boost. Hence steps should be taken to encourage original research activities which will help develop India and mankind

-Anil Sharma

Knowledge Scientist

Dolcera

© Dolcera 2009, All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication should be copied without the permission from the authour or from Dolcera.

Disclaimer: The above report has been prepared from the data provided in the Annual Report 07-08 by the IPO. There can be manual errors and the author or the company(Dolcera) takes no responsibility for the damage caused due to the data provided.

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KPOs - Copal and Pipal - are featured in the New York Times today.

Worldwide, the wind energy sector has now become firmly installed as one of the important players in the energy markets, with the total value of new generating equipment installed in 2006 reaching €18 billion, or US$23 billion from US$14 billion in 2005. Table data source: Global Wind Energy Council - 2006 report The above table pattern of development shows that new players such as Portugal and China are gaining ground. What could be the reason? Some facts from China: According to a a reported invterview, Vestas Chief Executive Officer Ditlev Engel played down the market share drop, saying an additional $750 million of projects expected to come online in the first half of 2008 would help to counteract the slip. “We’ve been surprised by how fast new entrants have entered the market. Yet since 2006, we have invested more than €1 billion ($1.5 billion) in organic growth,” he says. The main challenge has come in China where local firms, such as Sinovel and Goldwind, have taken advantage of a Chinese government push to increase renewable generation from 7% of total energy production to 15% by 2020. That has led to an explosion of activity from both local and international players, such as General Electric (GE) and Siemens (SI). Vestas, for example, increased the number of wind farms delivered to Chinese clients by 20% last year, compared to 2006. But Chinese firms have increased their local orders, taking a bite out of Vestas’ share of the market. Despite the slip, analysts reacted favorably to the Danish company’s results, which included a 26% increase in annual revenues, to $7.3 billion, and operating margins that grew almost four percentage points year-over-year, to 9.1% in 2007. According to forecasts from Vestas, revenue should hit $8.5 billion in 2008, while operating profit is expected to increase 10% to 12% by year end. A look at intellectual property creation in wind power domain: IP creation from across the globe: Top companies in IP creation: Wind power patent distribution based on technology: