Justice Prathiba M. Singh's Take On India's Journey In The Field Of Intellectual Property Rights

Justice Prathiba M. Singh was recently speaking as a keynote speaker in a seminar titled “IP In Metaverse & Publicity Rights - Protecting Buildings and Sculptures” where she took the audience through the entire journey India as a country has gone through to come at par with the world in terms of Intellectual Property Rights. She put forth a capsule of where India was and how far it has come on its journey of innovation and also shared her experience in the IP wing.

In the early 90s the kind of IP litigation that High courts saw was very typical where a big brand owner and a small company owner would be in dispute and the parties would later settle but then the jurisprudence evolved beautifully. While earlier the litigation was between big companies and small establishments such as ones from daryaganj or Nehru Place but as more and more domestic businesses started applying for trademarks the actual change started taking place as the local businesses realised the value of brand. 

The growing rate of domestic trademark owners (80% trademarrk owners) shwoed that they local owners were realising the value of protecting their brand and the value of capitalising on their brand. Hence the period of early 2000s saw a complete reformation of IP Laws in India. This was the period which saw cases such as movies and songs copyrights, piracy through cable operators and illicit recordings being made. 

Thereafter, TRIPS came onto the scene and the entire field of Intellectual Proprty became a more formal and organised arena and slowly cases related to spamming, fishing and domain name violations started coming before the court. From there onwards, the growth of India in terms of Intellectual property Laws was at par with the world and in some instances even ahead of the world in terms of jurisprudence.

Thereafter, around the years 2018-19 there was a need felt in the Delhi High Court to start demarcating benches for IP cases as there was a large number of patent cases and other related matters and that led to a thinking process as to how to deal with these litigations.

Another direction where the conversation flowed was towards Intellectual property Appellate Board which was abolished in April, 2021 as per the Tribunals Reforms Ordinance 2021.it had led to pendency of matters as there was a lack of technical organisation. After the abloshing of the board the crisis was converted into an opportunity by the Delhi High Court and teh IP division was extablished and teh survey of more than fourty jurisdictions led to the drafting of the IP Divisions rules.

In the IP landscape, the current vision is that all high courts would have these IP benches and currently 2000 cases have been transferred to the delhi high court from the IPAB and a large number of them have been disposed of. Currently there are 3 benches focusing of IP matters.

Justice Singh mentioned several challenges taht she has observed from teh bench and the most prominent one of them is internet as any issue in the field gets increased with a multitude of 10 when internet comes onto the scene. She emphasized that as judges it has been a huge challenge whenever there are cross jurisdictional issues such as those faces in cases like Ramdev v. Google as how do injunctions passed abroad get enforced in India.

She took the audience’s attention towards the telegram matter where the notes prepared by a teacher were distributed through telegram channel but the servers are loacted in Singapore. While they were willing to block the channels, they were not wiolling to disclose the identity of the channel owners which was sought by the teacher.

All these challenges make us understand that geoblocking is also a prominent issue as the concept of free speech is involved and this shows the need of TRIPS 2.0 as there needs to be some kind of respect to the court orders of other jurisdictions and trampling on others need to be prevented. A multidimensional system to reslove disputes is required as it is not viable for IP owners to go and get rights in every country of the world.