IP and licensing

Intellectual property is often the most valuable asset a business holds that does not appear on a conventional balance sheet: a brand, a proprietary process, a piece of software, or a body of creative or technical work. IP and licensing work covers both securing that asset under Indian law and structuring how it is used, licensed or transferred.

Registration and protection

Trademark protection requires filing with the Trade Marks Registry, responding to examination objections, and where necessary contesting or defending opposition proceedings brought by third parties. Patent protection follows a parallel but more technical process before the Indian Patent Office, involving drafting the application to capture the invention's scope and prosecuting it through examination. Copyright in literary, software and creative works can be registered, though protection under Indian law also arises independently of registration; licensing that copyright is a separate exercise in setting out what a licensee may and may not do with the work.

Licensing and confidentiality

Once IP exists, how it is used by others is a matter of contract. Licence agreements, franchise arrangements and technology transfer agreements each set out the scope of use, territorial and field-of-use restrictions, and the royalty or consideration structure, and each has to be drafted to match the value of the underlying right. Where a business relies on a process or method that is not registrable (a trade secret or item of confidential know-how), protection depends entirely on the confidentiality obligations built into its contracts and internal practices, since there is no registry to fall back on if that documentation is weak.

Enforcement

Where a registered right is infringed, or an unregistered mark is used by a competitor in a way that amounts to passing off, enforcement proceeds through the Registrar in some cases and through the High Courts in others. What a business holding IP has to decide is how much of its protection strategy rests on registration, and how much rests on contract, since the two work together rather than as substitutes for each other.