IP RIGHTS AND STARTUPS: HOW WELL INDIA’S IP ECOSYSTEM ACTUALLY SERVES EARLY-STAGE COMPANIES

This project is a analysis of Indian Intellectual property ecosystem, it aims to answer a simple question that has been plaguing the Indian Judiciary and the people of India, India has multiple acts such the trademark act 1999, the patents act 1970, the copyright act 1957, and many others, however despite this India ranks remarkably low on International IP Index, to be exact India is 1ranked 42nd out of a total of 55 countries, with a overall score of 38.64 percent, this International IP Index is released by U.S Chamber Of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Centre, This index benchmarks the global economies on how robust, protective, and effective their intellectual property frameworks are. This project focuses on finding the core of this issue, we will be analysing the IP framework of India and we will compare its structure with countries like US and Singapore, in this project we will be discussing factors such as cost of patenting and litigation involving IP, how much time does it take for approval of a patent or trademark, and other important factors like awareness of IP rights and its enforcement in India. We will compare cases as well to better illustrate the point of this project, all the data of this project comes from secondary sources such as articles and surveys and this project focuses on the gaps that exists in the Indian IP system. We also found at the end of the project that although India has a robust IP legal framework, there are major structural and enforcement gaps, and schemes like Startup India may have increased the number of Startups in the country but that does not mean that these startups can thrive in the Indian market.