covid19

Without any second thoughts, innovation is becoming prolific with each passing day as the COVID-19 pandemic is giving the desired push to the pace of the Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), specifically in the fields of medicine and electronics.

According to the Madhya Pradesh (MP) Council of Science and Technology, most of the applications for IPRs are coming from Indore, followed by Bhopal.

The energy and enthusiasm required for keeping the wheels rolling to combat the Coronavirus (COVID-19) have paved the way for various individuals and companies filing Trademark Applications for sanitizers, medicines, surgical equipment, disinfectants, immunity boosters, masks, gadgets, and food products.

Dr. NK Choubey, the head and senior principal scientist at Madhya Pradesh Council of Science and Technology, Patent Information Centre, has said that the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered innovation in numerous fields and prompted the individuals to register their innovations and avoid any breach of the IPRs. He further said that the pace for IPRs has always been sluggish in MP, and now due to the lockdown, the processing work has become slow.

In general, most of the applications for IPRs are filed by large companies; however, several small and medium-scale companies have largely applied for IPRs post-COVID-19.

According to the reports of the private patent agents and officials, somewhere around 600 trademark applications were filed from March to mid-July in MP, out of which, near about 400 applications were filed by the companies of Indore.

In India, Trademark Registration, under the Trade Marks Act of 1999, enables registering brand names, logos, symbols, taglines, signatures, sounds, shapes, to name a few. A Registered Trademark needs to be renewed once every ten years.

Rakesh Soni, a patent advocate and agent in Indore, has said that he has filed somewhere around 55 trademark applications for sanitizers, medicines, surgical products, including edible commodities and masks, since March this year. According to him, the pace has indeed been encouraging post-COVID-19 as companies are coming up with new things and inventions. He also mentioned patents are comparatively less; however, a lot of industrial designs and trademarks are being registered. To date, Soni has filed five Patent Applications for the incubation chamber, mask, immunity booster, smart dustbin, and blockchain technology.

An ayurvedic medicine manufacturer from Indore has said that he has seen an encouraging sale of immunity boosters developed by him in the city. As the sales were up by almost 20%, the ayurvedic medicine manufacturer decided to get the trademark registered for the same to safeguard the innovation.