The Hindu Business Line : IPR issues: CII summit stresses on specialised patent courts for India

THE Patent Court judges from the US and the UK, along with senior patent lawyers representing top firms such as Oracle, Nektar Therapeutics USA and Royal Philips Electronics, also of the US, have suggested creation of specialised patent courts in India to convert knowledge into intellectual property.

Speaking at the last plenary session of the CII Partnership Summit 2005 on "Role of patents in society and commerce" here, speakers said creation of such courts with trained judges familiar with the complicated IPR issues would greatly help Indian businesses to convert ideas into valuable IP.

Mr Justice Randall Rader of the Court of Appeals of Federal Court of the US and the Chief Justice of the Patent Court of the UK, Mr Hugh Laddie, felt the specialised courts were necessary to take advantage of the new legislation that India has put in place to make its laws more WTO-compliant.

Citing cases in their own countries, they said even countries such as China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan were now setting up these courts.

Stressing on the need to be "fast, cheap and predictable" in the justice delivery system, Mr Justice Laddie said this can be ensured only by specialised courts that did not need to learn from scratch.

He said in the UK, trials of complicated patent cases were usually completed within one year, and judges normally took between three and six weeks to pronounce their verdicts.

Presenting the corporate view, Mr Jack Haken, Vice-President of Royal Philips Electronics, USA, said protection of intellectual capital and converting into intellectual property was even more important, given how for many products, the value that was added was mostly of design and software, not of manufacturing which was outsourced.

He said Philips also made money by royalties on the ideas it generated, but converted into products by other companies.

Harvard Prof gives recipe for building world class cos: At an earlier plenary, Prof Krishna G. Palepu of the Harvard Business School, while prescribing a formula for building world class companies, said companies need to craft a unique value proposition rooted in a deep local knowledge, and then execute it to world class standards by investing in outstanding leadership and governance. He clarified that "whatever be the model, you can't benchmark yourself to the local companies as the local environment is low end. To aim high, you have to benchmark yourself to global leaders".

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