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India lags in number of IT patents
By agencies
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Thursday, 05 January 2006, 20:30 IST
BANGALORE: India may be the world leader in information technology but it trails in a big way when it comes to patents in the IT sector.
While the top 10 patents holders across the world are IT companies, in India, no IT firm has patents. The list of top 10 patents holders in India comprises only pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies, a paper said.
In India, 184 patents are held by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, followed by Ranbaxy (56) and Dr Reddy's Laboratories (19). Worldwide, though, the highest number of patents is held by IBM (3,248) followed by Matsushita Electric industrial company (1,934) and Canon (1,805), the Business Standard said.
A major deterrent for these IT companies is the Indian patents law, which does not allow software per se to be patented.
However, research in the pharmaceutical sector has been given a major boost after the 2005 amendments to the patents law, which allow for product patents.
In the US the number of pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly that feature in the patents holders' list is only 40.
"The cost of researching new molecules is much higher than the cost of discovering new algorithms. While it makes commercial sense to get patents for newer versions of a software, it is not so for newer molecules," the paper said quoting an industry expert.