Intellectual property and startups

The world is emerging and evolving drastically. This change is not only felt in our country but globally where everyone wants to come forward and build something unique. Form the ancient time the man is always in a search of knowledge and eventually knowledge gave birth to the innovation. It is because of innovation that we have had a long journey from stone age to the modern period. Everyone wants to protect their innovation from getting misused and so the laws of intellectual property came into existence which helped the owner to protect their work from getting misused with establishing stringent punishments to protect the rights of the owners. The intellectual property came with the intent to give legal protection to the creators and investors and include patent act, copyright act, trademark act, designs act, geographical indication act. The main motto behind these acts are to protect the intangible assets like inventions, writings, brand name plus it also gives exclusive rights to the inventors to protect their wok.

This helps in encouraging innovation as in the absence of these laws here might be a lack of motivation among the people regarding the wrong use of their innovation going in the hands of other or by the other person claiming the innovations as theirs, in such a case this brings a huge threat to the creators as for creation of anything takes an enormous amount of patience time emery and investment. If there would be no law for the protection of an intellectual property then there would be possible threat to the creators in the market and nobody would like to invent something with a fear of it getting stolen. In this competitive world today, we have to pay a huge amount of money to pay for the registration of an intellectual property. There are huge sharks in the market who invest a huge amount of money to get their innovations get registered under the intellectual property. There is various intellectual property which can be resisted with the government for instance we have patents for inventions, copyrights for creative works like books and music, trademark for brand identity and trade secrets for confidential business information’s.

The intellectual property gives a kind of confidence to the inventors and creators towards their work and also a protection towards the possible threats that may arise in the future. Although we have pros in relation to the registration of intellectual property, but it is rightly said that every coin has its wo sides, so even if something has certain amount of advantages related to it still it has some or the other shortcomings. Like in this case we have various pro of opting for that registration of intellectual property but with certain amount of limitations as the registration process f some of the intellectual property are expensive for instance I would like to mention that the filing of the patent is most expensive, even with the government fees, professional fees for drafting filing and responding to an examination report cost around Rs. 20,000 to 1,50,000per patent also If there are multiple products and feature involved along with it the cost of patents multiplies quickly.

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S it can become a hindrance in the path of the new startups which does has a huge amount of capital to invest in the registration of startups and so they might face a threat from the market around as there are huge giants who could copy their ideas and mention them under their name which can cause a loss to the investors and creators and also can give birth to the fear in the mind of the individuals who are thinking to build something more efficient and effective for the world which would eventually erode the thought of innovation among the individuals. Also, there are certain more limitations to the intellectual property registration as it is not a on time investment and it requires the annual maintenance fees which is not the same of the original amount but increases over time. Patents have an annual maintenance, whereas trademarks need renewal after every 10 years and the renewal fee for designs apply after every five years. These early costs can be a burden on the startup, especially if it has not generated its revenue. Another limitation of the intellectual property Is its time-consuming process as it can take months to years for its registration, usually patents take three to five years for the full grant whereas trademarks can take 12 to 18 months for this process.

It become really tiring for companies especially startups to register the intellectual property as they would need to chose which intellectual property to choose first as they often have limited capital making them vulnerable to the competition around the competitive market. If they prioritize a wrong intellectual property hen it can eventually leave their innovations or creativity to the huge risk of their opponents in the market. Even if the startup manages to register the intellectual property then also enforcing them can be expensive. The government of India is giving a huge focus to the startups and have formulate various policies as well for regulating the same but they also need to make legislation for the startups in regards to the intellectual property to ensure that more people come together and we move toward innovation to achieve the vision of becoming a Vishwa guru one day

Author: Pratyksha Priya, in case of any queries please contact/write back to us via email to chhavi@khuranaandkhurana.com or at  Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorney.