The Hindu Business Line : State not to usurp Centre’s powers over IPR: Minister

Thiruvananthapuram, June 14 The proposed legislation for ‘creation of rights on traditional knowledge’ would not usurp the Centre’s authority to legislate on issues pertaining to intellectual property right.

The State Law Minister, Mr M. Vijayakumar, made this clarification while addressing a national workshop on ‘Intellectual Property Rights in the knowledge economy’ here on Friday.

The workshop was organised jointly by the Patent Information Centre-Kerala and the Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (Tifac).

Digitization of traditional knowledge does not provide a comprehensive mechanism to prevent its misappropriation. By taking up the legislation, the idea is to create rights for traditional knowledge preservers and make them aware of their rights.

“We seek to train focus on effective mode of traditional knowledge protection through model legislation, which is the real need of the hour. We would be much delighted if the Centre takes it further from there,” the Minister said.

The legislation would have teeth only if it is supplemented with extensive codification of traditional knowledge as mentioned in the State’s IPR policy.

Traditional Knowledge Digital Libraries (TKDL) will enable legal action against usurpation of traditional knowledge. The Law Department will nucleate as many projects as necessary for codification of knowledge under “Mission Intellectual Property Right”, the umbrella mechanism being set up entire IPR administration of the State.

DATABASE SET UP

“As a first step in this direction, we would request all departments to transfer the TKDL-Kerala project being run under them to the control of Law Department.

Under the project, more than 2,000 Ayurveda documents, manuscripts and texts have been identified, a database has been created in accordance with the guidelines of the World Intellectual Property Organisation and nearly 3,100 medicinal formulations screened and entered. Such codification must occur in other fields as well.

The IPR policy is a major step towards achieving the goal of creating an enabling environment that recognises and values creativity and innovation.