EK CUP CHAI

No I’m not crooning Alisha Chenoy’s song!

I read a news item that India wanted its patent laws to be as good as International laws. So it appointed R.A. Mashelkar as committee head who would make sure that the laws matched and the patent laws are good. So far so good.But what happened next is something only possible in India.

The Mashelkar Committee submitted a report to the Government. And it has been found that some lines have been reproduced (read plagiarized) from the Intellectual Property Institute of the Oxford University. It happens only in India.

There is this joke I heard ‘n-number’ of times. You must have heard it to! Let me tell that to you. An American makes a thin ‘Pin’to show America’s Greatness. A Chinese makes a hole in the pin to show China’s Greatness. And then, an Indian writes/imprints “Made in India” to show India’s greatness. I wonder if such issues can be treated as jokes any longer!

India is known for its ‘lifting’. It is said that our Constitution became the bulkiest, because it was hugely ‘influenced’ by the constitution of many other countries. Not to forget many great ‘tunes’, film scenes, scripts and what not. So now it looks like India is trying to copy Patent laws as well.

May be it is good practice to copy. Companies like GE tell its employees that they don’t mind “shameless copying”. But of course they do pay for it. Is it really worth to plagiarize? I cannot say “Yes or No”. Because you see I’m already using a ‘News Item’ to create this post. But I’m trying to recreate it in one of the other way.

So how thin is the line between a patented item and a recreated one. May be to understand this concept, the Masheklar committee had to take ‘somebody’s help’!

But you tell me guys: Is plagiarism/piracy justified? It it is not – how the hell can most Indians use the pirated version of Windows (not to forget the ‘eternal’ MS-Office) and many other softwares? And if plagiarism is OK, then what good will Patent laws do to India?