Latha Jishnu: Search-proof and disclosure-shy

PATENTLY ABSURD

Swati is an activist-lawyer who knows the four patents offices in the country inside out. In her search for patent application details, she has visited the Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai offices of the Controller General of Patents (CGP) so often that she can describe the furniture in these offices in detail "" and with loathing. If you spend a lot of time waiting in the anterooms of government offices, the standard issue chairs and leaky water dispensers can be overwhelming.

For Delhi-based Swati, these visits are easily among the most frustrating experiences of her career. There is the travel, which is avoidable; there is officialdom that believes it is duty-bound to prevent disclosure, and there is at the end of it the aggravation of finding critical information missing.

Why Swati and, to a lesser extent, her corporate counterparts are forced to make these trips is because the patent office is stuck in another era. There is no way people can do an online search of the thousands of pending applications except in a limited way. Although the CGP claims its website offers "state-of-the-art search", this simply isn't true.

The patents office is neither digitised nor centralised and its functioning is far from transparent. Worse, its four centres operate as independent units. So, if a patent application has been filed in Chennai, then you need to send a request in writing to that office to get the complete specifications.

You pay Rs 30 for a copy of the filed patent (Rs 300 if it's a foreign patent), Rs 25 for a copy of the main patent claim after a tedious exchange with the minions. Then you wonder why India, which claims to be the leader of the software pack, cannot have a searchable database even three years after it introduced product patents.

Ever since India accepted product patents in January 2005, the commerce ministry has been making rich claims about sprucing up the patent office to ensure that there was good infrastructure to deal with the surge of applications. And a surge there has been: over 8,000 applications have been filed by the pharmaceutical industry alone. Imagine the plight of anyone scanning this list manually or with very limited search facility.

Fortunately, Bhaven Sampat happened to take an interest in India's patents. Sampat is an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Although an economist, Sampat is interested in issues at the intersection of health policy and innovations. One of his projects is examining the effects of patents on access to medicines in India, and he was surprised to learn that data was unavailable.

Sampat tells me that he spoke to a programmer friend, Patrick Crosby of XB Labs, and that "it seemed reasonable easy to create a web version of the dataset." So, with a small amount of funding from the Ford Foundation, they charged forward, he says. The result is india.bigpatents.org, a free website where you can search for pending patents in India by application number, abstract, inventor, firm, date and priority number. That was a year ago, and, as Swati will tell you, the best thing to have happened.

Without a searchable database, it's almost impossible to challenge applications. Pre-grant opposition to patents is possibly the best safeguard in the Indian Patents Act because it helps to weed out the weak cases for patenting.

Industry, too, has been using this free website while putting in increasingly terse complaints to the commerce ministry about the shortcomings of the patent office. In a recent representation it points out that the timely publication of patent applications and full disclosure of the critical information are important not only for a decision on investing in a new project but also for abandoning an ongoing project.

The more critical issue is missing data. The patent office, much to the chagrin of those seeking details, does not list critical information that is standard practice in the developed world, such as International Non-proprietary Name (INN) of the substance as the title of the patent in case of pharma products.

One theory is that patent offices tend to think of patent applicants as their customers since they have paid a fee. Ergo, keep the information confidential. This might help explain the mindset of the patent office babus. What they need is a firm reminder that the patent system is based on disclosure and that it serves a public cause much more than a private interest.

Sampat, meanwhile, is working on an update that will link directly to drug names and link Indian applications to corresponding international applications. But for full specifications, one would still have to visit the patent offices. What use a patent office that is itself technology-deficient and disclosure-shy?

This bi-weekly column on patents and copyrights will take a critical look at how the system functions. It will analyse policy issues on intellectual property, their implementation and implications, with a special focus on the pharmaceutical, including biotech, and software sectors