Intellectual Property Rights: Who Needs Them?

The twenty-first century will be the century of knowledge, indeed the century of the intellect. A nation’s ability to translate knowledge into wealth and social good through innovations will determine its future. Thus innovations hold the key to the creation as well as processing of knowledge. Consequently issues of generation, evaluation, protection and exploitation of intellectual property would become critically important all over the world. Their analysis of intellectual property rights (IPRs) is presented in two sections: in the first they deal with the concept of intellectual property rights and the rationale behind them. In the second section, focus is on the intellectual property rights in the Indian context.[Working Paper No. 0040]