The good news is that intellectual property rights (IPRs) have greater public visibility these days. The bad news is that a lot of it is misguided skepticism. IPRs are critical to incentivising innovation, which, in turn, is key to sustaining economic growth and increasing living standards. It is often said that patents restrict competition and, because they are negative rights, they confer a “licence to sue”. This is fundamentally flawed. Patents, in fact, are meant to structure competition in the market. We tend to forget that there is free entry into the innovation race to obtain patents. This is one of the major benefits of the system—to get the latest and useful technologies in time to solve collective problems. The possible role of patents can cover a wide spectrum, depending upon sectoral specificities. While a strict appropriation strategy might be appropriate in the pharmaceutical industry, the chemical industry might rely more on exclusive licensing models. Patents can even be efficiently used as bargaining chips in the electronics industry and can be used for defensive purposes to avoid being torpedoed. With perennial instability in IP rule-making added to the general skepticism towards IPR that Indian policymakers seem to have, they do not adequately appreciate the fundamental reality that IP laws and policies are meant to incentivise innovation by establishing enforceable boundaries to protect new products, processes, and original works of expression. The value of legitimate IPR embedded in the resulting technology must be paid for and it needs to be separated from the IPR holder (just like in litigation it is imperative to take the adversary out of the adversarial). If the trust—the bedrock of the innovation ecosystem—is lost, the system is at risk of crumbling.

(Live Mint)