Mortgage of Patents & Trade Marks Can Help MSMEs Raise Funds

To allow mortgage of Patents and Trademarks would help the MSME particularly the start-ups who have nothing in the name of physical assets but the IPRs which holds huge financial potential, said an expert.

IPR policy will not only incentivise entrepreneurship and innovation in the country, but will aid in the conversion of copyrights and patents for commercial use, Commerce Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said.

Reacting to this, PD Kaushik an IPR expert said, “MSMEs have made a stock exchange for them for the exact evaluation. These all were considered as intangible assets so that they won’t be transferred when any unit of MSME is sold which transferred it as goodwill.”

“Now they are planning to change the law and consider patent as a tangible asset, so that bank can give loan on it. They want to give it some recognition.  It is very useful. But the Kingfisher story is as same; the Banks told that they had given loan on the name of Kingfisher only” he added.

Meanwhile, another expert, Debashis Bandhopadhyay, Director, Policy at FISME, said, “Mortgaging of IPRs like physical assets will be a welcome initiative.  Start-ups and new entrepreneurs face uphill task in getting Bank finance as they could not arrange physical assets like land building etc. as mortgage. Today IPRs often hold huge financial potential but to discover them, expert guidance is needed. Will the Indian Banks, already in a ‘once bitten, twice shy’ mode will venture for such risky initiatives, is a moot question.”

Last week, government announced a comprehensive national IPR policy.

The Minister told media persons on Monday that, "Also, most importantly in India, conversion of copyright of patents for commercial use has never been a vibrant space."

Very few people even bother to register a patent or apply for a copyright and those who did thought that converting it for commercial use was not their cup of tea, she said.

"That dichotomy had undermined the potential that existed. This policy, the way in which we have drawn the action plan for startups and trying to link it all up to creativity and to the larger public, that's where I think the policy has come very well.

"Make it possible for every patent that has the potential for commercial use, make it possible for every copyright that has the potential for commercial use," Sitharaman said.