Need to compress time to implement trademarks, copyrights: Piyush Goyal

Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal Wednesday said that the time taken to implement trademarks and copyrights needs to be compressed and any delays done away with.

“Our trademark filings are the sixth largest in the world today. Our patent grants last year was about 100,000, maybe slightly less, because last year we were able to take off, shed off a lot of the backlog,” Goyal said at the National Intellectual Property (IPR) awards.

He said as people are getting confidence that patents are being sorted out and granted in a record time, the enthusiasm to file patents in India is also improving and increasing.


He said that the government is trying
to encourage the IPR ecosystem to develop in India but trademark is still one area which takes “pretty long”.

“We need to compress that time. Copyrights also we need to compress any delays in implementing it…how we can get the enforcement of copyrights to be strengthened and made more seamless so that the copyright owners or the trademark owners can truly be protected from unscrupulous elements,” Goyal said.

The minister also said that the enforcement mechanism needs to be strengthened a little and examiners need to be better skilled besides making the ecosystem in tier two, and three cities more robust by increasing the awareness about IP protection.