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This article provides information about the implication of TRIPS for the developing countries:
A major problem that inventors faced for most of the 19th century, a period of rapid technological progress, was the absence of international regulations governing patent protection. While individual countries had quite effective patent laws and regulations, they varied from one another.
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Inventors had to apply for patents simultaneously in many countries so that an application for a patent in one country would not make it ineligible for the grant of a patent in all others, because it had lost novelty. By patent it means a convention granted by the State to protect the interest of the inventor/investor of a product.
According to the U.N., a patent is defined as a statutory privilege granted by the government to inventors and other persons deriving their rights from the inventor for a fixed period of years to exclude other persons from manufacturing, using or selling a patented product or from utilising a patent method or process.
Through an international treaty, the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, 1883, already existed; in the accelerated pace of globalisation and highly competitive atmosphere MNCs/TNCs demanded more security to their products. As a result the Agreement on Trade related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) was negotiated as a part of the Uruguay Round of GATT and it became effective from the day WTO was formed, i.e., 1st January, 1995.
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With India becoming a signatory to the WTO agreement, it became obliged to follow the TRIPs regime. Till then India was governed by the Indian Patents Act, 1970, which permitted only process patents. The same product, for example a drug, can be produced by a number of alternative processes, each somewhat different from the rest. This made possible for Indian companies to produce any patented product, patented in other countries as well, following a slightly different process, without violating the patents’ right under Indian law.
This would no longer be possible under the WTO regime as India being a member will have to amend the patent law to allow both product and process patent. However, developing countries like India, which did not have product patent have been given time till January 2005 to amend their patent law. The amended Patents law was passed in the Indian Parliament on 22nd March, 2005.