United States Trade Representative (USTR) maintained India on its list of patent violating countries because of India’s protection and implementation of IP.  Along with India, ten other countries including China, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, Argentina, Algeria, Ukraine, Kuwait, Venezuela, and Chile were placed in the priority checklist.

India was added to the priority check list by the US government based on complaints of MNC drug makers led by US companies over India’s poor enforcement of intellectual property law. The US Chamber of Commerce appreciated the USTR decision to place India on Priority checklist.

The USTR “special 301” report is a annual report that has been issued every year from 1989.USTR issued a “special 301” report(2017) for analyzing global developments on trade and intellectual property (IP) and identifying trading partners with negative records on protection ,implementation or market access for US innovators and creators.

The report said that the USTR identifies India on the priority checklist for lack of enhancement to its IP framework and the new challenges that affected US right holders over the past year. And also the challenges covering US business in India, particularly for pharmaceuticals and software, implementation action and policies that are insufficient to break the problem, copyright policies that do not properly incentivize the creation and commercialization of content, and an outdated and insufficient trade secrets legal framework.

Specifically this report used to locate the IP-related trade obstacles with special focused on the countries in the checklist and priority checklist.

The Author is a Patent Consultant from MR Technollect Solutions (www.MRTechnollect.com).