[A2k] India: Official fumbles at IPR forum, envoy seeks remedy

[James Love]

Official fumbles at IPR forum, envoy seeks remedy
KG NARENDRANATH

TIMES NEWS NETWORK
[ TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2004

NEW DELHI: Have Indian officials compromised at international fora the
government=92s actual position on intellectual property rights (IPR)?

It certainly has, going by a recent missive from India=92s ambassador to
the UN, HS Puri, to a few senior officials in New Delhi, including the
commerce secretary, the HRD secretary and the special secretary in the
ministry of external affairs.
And what=92s at stake due to the misadventure of the bureaucracy is
substantial =97 loss of national authority on grant of patents and
subservience to an international patent granting surrogate.

A mere procedural reform in the Patent Co-operation Treaty (PCT) could
well assume the unwarranted proportion of having to deal with
substantive issues of patent appraisal and grant, under the World
Intellectual Property Organisation=92s (WIPO). The government should
reiterate its policy of opposing upward harmonisation based on
=93permissive standards=94 of the developed countries, in particular, the
US, Mr Puri warns in his letter to the senior officials.

What has particularly caused the UN ambassador=92s concern was the U-turn
by senior bureaucrat AE Ahmed, to support the WIPO director-general=92s
patent agenda when the issue came up for discussion at WIPO assembly
late last year.

=93It seems that Mr Ahmed is unhappy that we should have opposed the
(WIPO) secretariat proposal of an =93optional protocol=94 that would take
the PCT into the arena of substantive patent issues,=94 Mr Puri said in
the letter, which was addressed to secretary, industrial policy, Laxmi
Chand, as well.

Mr Puri stressed that he was unaware of any change in India=92s official
position opposing any move to bring about upward global patent
harmonisation, which had been voiced in the WTO in Geneva or in the Doha
ministerial. Mr Ahmed=92s own statement in =9102 during the WIPO assembly
underscored the government=92s misgivings about the WIPO patent agenda.

When contacted, Mr Ahmed said he was unaware of any communication from
India=92s permanent mission in the US to New Delhi in the said matter. =93I
have no comments whatsoever to offer,=94 he said.

But, apart from a copy of Mr Puri=92s letter, ET also has a copy of a
=93confidential=94 letter written concurrently by India=92s deputy permanen=
t
representative to the UN, Debabrata Saha, to Mr Ahmed himself.
Expressing surprise at the change of stand by Mr Ahmed at the WIPO
assembly, Mr Saha said, =93Optional instruments are anything but
optional... in the real world of international agreements, there is no
such thing as opt-in/opt-out flexibility.=94

To drive home this point, Mr Saha cited the examples of other supposedly
optional pacts such as Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Paris
Convention and the Codes of Tokyo Round.

In course, all these became virtually obligatory. The stated objective
of the technical changes sought in the PCT regulations as part of the
procedural reform is to make the PCT system more =93user-friendly=94, which=
,
Mr Saha points out, is an euphemism for =93more permissive.=94

According to Mr Puri, a large majority of developing country members of
WIPO are clearly not equipped to resist pressure from the protagonists
of upward harmonisation. Nor, perhaps, do they see much at stake for
their own countries, given their limited capacity to contribute to, or
draw from, the knowledge economy.
It is left to a few larger developing countries (such as India, China,
Brazil and Egypt) therefore, to resist these efforts.



--
James Love, Director, CPTech, http://www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology in Washington, DC
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