Intellectual Property Rights and Patents

Ordinary physical property — land, household goods — is tangible and protected by long-established property law, but the outputs of biotechnology (transformed microorganisms, plants, animals and the processes used to make commercial products from them) are intangible intellectual property, and are protected instead through patents, copyright and trademarks. A patent is a government-issued document giving an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture, use or sell an invention for a defined period, usually 20 years, in exchange for publicly disclosing how the invention works so that others can build on that knowledge later; to qualify, an invention must be novel and useful, must be inventive and reproducible, and the patent application must fully describe it. Biotechnology patents can cover living entities (microorganisms, animals, plants, cell lines, cell organelles, plasmids, genes) as well as natural products made by living systems, such as alcohols and antibiotics; the first living organism ever patented was a genetically engineered bacterium, Pseudomonas putida, engineered by Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty in 1971 and patented in 1980. India's intellectual-property regime is also shaped by international trade law: the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), framed in 1948 to settle trade disputes among nations, mainly benefited developed countries, and the WTO's TRIPS agreement later obliged member states including India to bring their patent laws into line. A geographical indication (GI) protects a product name tied to a specific place whose qualities or reputation derive from that origin — Darjeeling tea was India's first GI-tagged product (2004-05), and Tamil Nadu itself has several, including Kancheepuram silk, the Coimbatore wet grinder, Thanjavur paintings, Madurai Malli and the temple jewellery of Nagercoil. Plant breeders' rights (PBRs) similarly protect newly bred plant varieties, recognising the contribution of breeders as well as of farming communities to genetic diversity. Copyright protects the expressed form of creative and scholarly work — such as a published DNA-sequence database, photomicrographs or other printed/recorded material — rather than …