First School of Intellectual Property Law at IIT(K) gets underway

Kolkata, Jul 23 (UNI) In an effort to protect the country's intellectual property rights in the face of cut throat competition, a full-fledged course on intellectual property law was started today by Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Kharagpur.

The proposal to set up the first School of Intellectual Property Law in the country was mooted on March 28, 2005 by Vinod Gupta, an alumunus and Life Fellow of IIT(K), who pledged one million US dollars for the purpose.

The Ministry of Human Resource Department accepted the proposal and agreed to match it with an equal grant paving the way to set up Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law (RGSOIPL).

Head of the Law school Prof Probir Kumar Gupta, who is also the Dean of Vinod Gupta School of Management said, ''This is a first of its kind as no law schools in the country teaches intellectual property law as a full-fledged course. Besides, there will be an integration between law and technology, which is not taught anywhere else in India.'' Mr Gupta said these were areas which law schools in the US like The George Washington University(GWU) Law School which have just ventured into this area.

A Technical Collaboration Agreement(TCA) with GWU was signed on January 30, 2006 at Bangalore in the areas of syllabus design, faculty training and research.

IIT Kharagpur Director Shishir K Dube stressed that it was imperative to have one's innovation protected by Intellectual Property Rights as India would be a hub of knowledge based activities and added that IIT(K) had 25 patents to its credit last year.

Speaking as the Chief Guest on the law school's inauguration, Chief Justice of Calcutta High Court V S Sirpurkar said a fusion between technical and legal knowledge was crucial. ''Law has always been very technical and no technology can proceed unless it is bound by laws,'' Mr Sirpurkar said.

India has suffered due to lack of awareness and dearth of trained Intellectual Property lawyers although the country was a knowledge pool, the Chief Justice said and added that unchannelised knowledge is a waste.

The RGSOIPL would be started in the IIT facilities at Kolkata(Salt Lake) and Kharagpur with two programs--a LLB program(Three years) leading to Bachelor of Law with specialisation in Intellectual Property Rights and a one and a half years Diploma in Intellectual Property Law(PGDIPL). Both the courses would have 50 seats each.

The capacity would be increased to 500 hundred students in the next five years and another 20 students would be taken into the IIT's Bhubaneswar facility in 2007. The IIT(K) is also planning to start an integrated BTech-LLB course in its second phase in the year 2009.

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