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From key IP challenges faced by SMEs when entering the Indian market to IP issues in the Indian cosmetics, e-mobility or biotech industry: our training sessions cover a broad range of sectors and topics linked to IP management and protection in India. You missed some of our past "live" training sessions? No problem, just browse through our workshop recordings and learn more about your favourite topic wherever and whenever you like.

The case study is centred around a European inventor, who developed a formula for a probiotic medical food and brought this to the US and Indian market. Based on key lessons learned by the inventor, it spotlights different factors which come into play when deciding in favour of expensive patent, or cheaper - but riskier - trade secret protection.

Tracing the story of the Austrian small and medium-sized company "TrainShoes", the case study sheds light on how the company successfully established its brand in the Indian market, but was soon confronted with an IP conflict as an Indian company was manufacturing shoes and clothes under the same brand.

In 2015, the Government of India launched the Smart Cities Mission to develop 100 smart cities in India. The main purpose of the project is to encourage sustainable and inclusive cities that: provide a core infrastructure, improve the quality of living, foster a clean and sustainable environment and create ‘smart’ solutions to challenges. This infographic sums up key aspects of the Smart Cities Mission, flags the most important IP rights in this context and highlights major benefits of using IP. 

With this new infographic the India IP SME Helpdesk team takes a look at the transport and e-mobility sectors in India, specifically summarising central IP rights relevant to these sectors and providing best practice examples and key takeways.

India has gained a reputation as the world’s biggest pharmacy, being a centre of manufacturing to a large part of the world’s drugs and medical equipment. In India as in the rest of the world, the pharma and healthcare sectors are some of the most highly regulated markets, which require regulatory approvals before any drug can be put on the market. This new factsheet seeks to offer EU SMEs general guidelines on how to protect and manage their intellectual property in India when operating in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors.

Trade secrets play an ever-increasing role in a company’s business strategy and IP portfolio. While trade secrets should primarily be seen as a tool to protect different kinds of information such as formulas, techniques or methods diffused across enterprises, they can also act as an alternative to formal IP rights in some limited cases. Introducing a definition of trade secrets, the publication also explains why trade secrets are important for SMEs willing to internationalise to India, and how to protect them on the Indian market.

In its annual Special 301 Report, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has again placed India on the "Priority Watch List", next to China, Russia and four additional countries. According to USTR, the countries placed on this list present the most significant concerns this year regarding insufficient IP protection or enforcement or actions that otherwise limited market access for persons relying on intellectual property protection.

Recently, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi officially inaugurated the country's first own 5G testbed. The new facility worth more than Rs 220 crore was developed in the framework of a multi-institute collaborative project by eight institutes led by IIT Madras. The testbed with facilities available at five different locations in India enables companies to test their inventions locally and thus become more self-reliant.

At the end of May, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the EUIPO and the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT), which will set the ground for future relations and cooperation between the two organisations.

The Lens Awards celebrates creativity and innovation in corporate film, storytelling, and visual communications. This year the European Union Intellectual Property Office's (EUIPO) short film "IPdentical: Imagine a world without creativity" has won the first prize for best use of video from the public sector at the Lens Awards 2022. Telling the story of a young girl who lives in a retro-futuristic dystopia where intellectual property does not exist, the film impressed the jury with its impactful concept providing a clear motivation for understanding and respecting IP.

The European Patent Office (EPO) recently announced the finalists of the “European Inventor Award 2022” and the new “Young Inventors Prize”. While the “European Inventor Award 2022” honours outstanding innovators and their contributions to a brighter and more prosperous world, the brand-new "Young Inventors Prize" recognises individuals or teams of innovators aged 30 and younger and celebrates technological solutions that support the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. For this year's inaugural "Young Inventors Prize" three successful initiatives were selected: an AI-driven waste management system, biodegradable pads and tampons to combat period poverty, and an app to detect Parkinson's disease early. The winners of both the “European Inventor Award 2022” and the “Young Inventors Prize” will be announced in a dedicated ceremony on 21 June.

The World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) has just published a new Patent Landscape Report on “Hydrogen fuel cells in transportation”. The report is a part of WIPO's anti climate-change efforts. The key findings show that the global transportation-related sector is responsible for almost 24 percent of direct carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion. Therefore, it becomes crucial to transform the transportation sector by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and put it on a Net Zero pathway to be able to fight climate change. This transformation can be only possible by combining innovation, technological developments, international cooperation and of course an adapted customer behaviour.

We continue our little series of blog posts on IP in the Metaverse, this time taking a closer look at patents. During the last months, patent applications related to the Metaverse have experienced an increase due to the continuous expansion of this field, as many High-Tech companies wanted to ensure the protection of the technology they are developing. The main interest of those companies concerns the development of both software and hardware devices bringing together different aspects of social media as well as Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) user experience, to make it more realistic. Read the full post and take a deep dive into the Metaverse!

In May 2022, the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled came to force in China. The Treaty aims to eliminate copyright-related obstacles for visually impaired people. According to China’s National Copyright Administration, “the enforcement of the treaty will substantially enrich the cultural life of the print-disabled population, and improve the quality of their education”.

In May 2022, the “Certain Provisions for the Hierarchy of Courts of Original Jurisdiction over Civil and Administrative IP Litigation” came to force. These Provisions aim to streamline the structure of the courts where disputes over intellectual property rights are adjudicated for the first time. According to the Provisions, “specialized intellectual property courts, intermediate people’s courts at capitals of provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities, and intermediate people’s courts purposefully assigned by the SPC shall have original jurisdiction over seven types of civil and administrative IP disputes involving intense scientific and technical elements, such as invention patents, utility model patents, new plant varieties, layout designs of integrated circuits, trade secrets, computer software copyrights, and monopolistic practices.”

Yazhou Bay Seed Laboratory in Sanya has developed a method to identify seed varieties at the molecular level to identify and fight counterfeit seeds. The method is called MNP marker which according to the Laboratory “can obtain identifications for crop varieties with much higher efficiency and 99.98 percent accuracy”. The method can be used to “help detect counterfeits and quickly clarify the intellectual property owners of imported germ plasm resources”. It is certainly an interesting invention for SMEs engaged in the developmet of new plant varieties.

In March 2022, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) issued the Annual Guidelines for Facilitating High-Quality Development of Intellectual Property 2022. The guidelines aim to improve the overall quality of China’s utility model patents. It is proposed to introduce stricter utility model examination rules to improve the quality of utility models, however, the level of inventive step required for a utility model is expeted to be lower than the one for invention patents.

In January 2022, the Standards for Determining General Trademark Violations came to force. The Standards identify concrete guidelines for judging trade mark violations and impose stricter requirements for trade marks. In this article, China IP SME Helpdesk external expert Mr. Jian Xu provides a detailed overview of the Standards.

The European Patent Office (EPO) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to strengthen their collaboration. The MoU sets out the development of specific activities, projects and programmes to support innovators, entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises across Europe. Going forward, both organisations aim to increase knowledge sharing and their efforts in supporting innovators.