Rethinking Patent Right: Private Property or Collective Property

Romit Raja Srivastava Student, Symbiosis Law School, Noida Email: satyamevjaytey@gmail.com Mob: +91-7503432750

Abstract
A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention. Generally patents are given for an individual invention. But there are certain cases where patent can be granted for a collective property. For example the decisions were made in case of Traditional medicinal inventive, that the patent right cannot be granted to a single individual of the community; because it is a collective effort and the patent right should be collective property of the community. The collective nature of the inventive and creative processes of local communities can even transcend the limits of one community. Attributing intellectual property rights to only one group, or even to a number of communities, would still exclude other holders of the same knowledge, possibly generating rivalries. There has been many studies conducted regarding this issue but none of them has clearly defined that what should be the law. This paper is aimed to find out whether patent right should be Individual property right or collective property right. Various IPR Laws particularly Patent Rights of different countries has also been compared in this paper.