Balancing Private Property Rights with Public Interests

Every time you use a medicine, stream a film, or read a textbook, intellectual property law is quietly at work in the background. It determines who can copy what, at what price, and for how long. At the heart of this system lies a fundamental tension: how do you reward creators for their work while ensuring that their creations remain accessible to the society that ultimately benefits from them? This is the central challenge of intellectual property protection – striking a workable balance between private rights and public interest.

What does “protecting property” mean in the IP context? 🔗

When we talk about protecting property in intellectual property law, we are not talking about fences or locks. Intellectual property rights grant creators exclusive control over the use and commercial exploitation of their work for a limited period. The protection covers inventions, brand identifiers, literary and artistic works, industrial designs, and confidential business information. The objective, as India’s own legal framework puts it, is to balance private rights with public interest while promoting innovation and economic growth.

What makes intellectual property distinct from physical property is that ideas are non-rivalrous – one person using a song or a formula doesn’t stop another from using it too. This is precisely why IP law doesn’t grant permanent ownership. Instead, it grants a temporary monopoly, after which the creation enters the public domain and becomes freely available to everyone.

The case for strong private rights 🔗

Innovation is expensive. A pharmaceutical company invests years of research and billions of rupees before a drug reaches the market. A novelist spends months, sometimes years, crafting a manuscript. An engineer works through dozens of failed prototypes before landing on a viable invention. Without legal protection, anyone could simply copy these results the moment they were made public – and the incentive to create in the first place would collapse.

Intellectual property rights law grants the creator or inventor a monopoly over their intellectual property as a reward for their intellect. This monopoly serves a clear purpose: it gives creators the economic breathing room to recover their investment and profit from their work. Copyright, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets each serve this function in their respective domains.

In India, copyright is governed by the Copyright Act, 1957, and protects literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works as well as cinematographic films and sound recordings. Patents are regulated under the Patents Act, 1970, and grant exclusive rights for 20 years from the date of filing. These protections aren’t just economic tools – they also include moral rights that let creators protect the integrity of their work and ensure proper attribution.

When private rights harm public welfare 🔗

Here is where the tension becomes real. A patent grants a monopoly, and monopolies allow the holder to set prices without competitive pressure. When a person who invents a medicine for a disease obtains patent protection, they acquire exclusive rights over its exploitation – and can set a high price that many patients simply cannot afford. This is not a hypothetical concern; it has played out in India’s courts in some of the most significant IP cases in the world.

Similarly, if copyright holders restrict access to educational materials, students and researchers are disadvantaged. If plant variety protections prevent farmers from saving and replanting seeds, agricultural communities suffer. The more absolute IP protection becomes, the more it risks converting a system designed to encourage creativity into one that hoards its fruits.

How Indian law maintains the balance 🔗

India’s legal system has developed several mechanisms that acknowledge both the need to protect creators and the imperative to serve the larger public.

Fair dealing provisions under the Copyright Act 🔗

The objective of permitting fair use is to strike a balance between the interests of the copyright owner and the interests of society at large. Section 52 of the Copyright Act, 1957 provides extensive fair dealing exceptions that allow copyrighted works to be used for purposes such as private study, research, criticism, news reporting, and education – without requiring permission from or payment to the copyright holder. This means a professor can reproduce an extract from a textbook for classroom use, or a journalist can quote from a published report without infringing copyright.

Compulsory licensing under the Patents Act 🔗

Perhaps no mechanism illustrates the private rights vs. public interest tension more sharply than compulsory licensing. Under Section 84 of the Patents Act, 1970, any person can apply for a compulsory licence if a patented invention is not available to the public at a reasonably affordable price, if the reasonable requirements of the public have not been met, or if the invention is not being worked within India.

This provision was put to dramatic use in Bayer Corp. v. Natco Pharma (2012). On March 9, 2012, the Patent Office issued the first-ever compulsory licence in India to Natco Pharma for the generic manufacturing of Nexavar, a life-saving drug used to treat liver and kidney cancer. Bayer’s patented version was priced at approximately ₹2,80,000 per month – far beyond the reach of most Indian patients. The Controller found the drug to be “exorbitantly priced” and noted it was frequently in short supply even in major cities – significant because it is a life-saving drug, not a luxury item. Natco’s generic version was offered at ₹8,800 per month, making it accessible to a vastly larger patient population. Bayer was awarded a 6% royalty on Natco’s sales, ensuring some return on its investment while removing the affordability barrier.

Section 3(d) and the fight against evergreening 🔗

Another powerful tool in India’s public-interest arsenal is Section 3(d) of the Patents Act, which prevents evergreening – the practice of making minor modifications to an existing drug and filing for a new patent simply to extend monopoly protection beyond the original patent term.

This provision was at the centre of one of the most consequential IP cases in Indian legal history: Novartis AG v. Union of India (2013). The Supreme Court of India gave its final decision in April 2013, rejecting Novartis’ appeal for patent protection for Glivec, a drug used for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, holding that it was only a modified version of a known substance and did not demonstrate enhanced efficacy. The Court held that Glivec was an example of “incremental innovation” under Section 3(d) and, as such, not eligible for patent protection. The branded version cost around ₹1,20,000 per month; Indian generic versions were available for ₹5,000 to ₹9,000.

The ruling was celebrated by public health advocates as a decisive affirmation that India’s patent system would not be held hostage to incremental tweaks designed to extend corporate monopolies at the expense of patient access.

India’s National IPR Policy 2016: a framework for balance 🔗

On May 12, 2016, the government released the National Intellectual Property Rights Policy, seeking to promote a holistic and conducive ecosystem to catalyse the full potential of IP for India’s economic growth and socio-cultural development while protecting the public interest. The policy carries the motto Creative India; Innovative India and explicitly frames its legal and legislative objective as having strong and effective IPR laws that balance the interests of rights owners with the larger public interest.

The policy also acknowledges that IP systems face real challenges: the high cost of enforcement, low levels of awareness among rights holders, and the difficulty of protecting rights in a digitised, globalised economy. These aren’t abstract administrative concerns – they directly affect whether the system works for individuals and small creators, not just large corporations.

The international framework: TRIPS and its flexibilities 🔗

India’s approach does not exist in isolation. The World Trade Organization’s TRIPS Agreement reflects the dual objective of protecting intellectual property while providing flexibility to safeguard public health and promote access to knowledge. India, as a WTO member and TRIPS-compliant nation, has consistently used these flexibilities – particularly in pharmaceutical patents – to prioritise domestic public health needs.

The Indian IP system maintains a fine balance between private rights through IPRs on one hand, and the rights of society as public interest on the other, and the TRIPS Agreement has allowed policy space to countries to evolve a regime that best suits their conditions. This policy space is precisely what India used in both the Bayer and Novartis cases – not as a rejection of IP protection, but as a calibration of it.

Why neither extreme works 🔗

A legal system that gives creators total, unlimited control over their innovations produces monopolies that stifle further innovation and deny access to those who need it most. But a system that offers no protection at all removes the economic incentive to innovate in the first place. No pharmaceutical company would invest in drug discovery if competitors could immediately copy and sell the result without bearing any of the research costs.

The goal of striking a balance between intellectual property rights and the public interest is not to favour one over the other, but to foster a cooperative relationship in which innovation benefits society and creativity is rewarded. The temporary nature of IP rights – patents lasting 20 years, copyright lasting the author’s lifetime plus 60 years in India – represents the foundational compromise: creators get a period of exclusivity, and then the creation belongs to everyone.

Competition law adds a further check. The Competition Commission of India has jurisdiction to investigate cases where IP rights are being used to distort markets or engage in anti-competitive practices, ensuring that private rights don’t become a tool for suppressing market competition rather than encouraging innovation.

What this means in practice 🔗

For law students and practitioners, the private rights vs. public interest debate in IP is not merely theoretical. It shapes how medicines are priced, how textbooks reach students, how farmers access seeds, and how technology spreads across borders. Every statutory exception, every compulsory licence, and every Section 3(d) rejection is a policy decision about where the line should be drawn – and those decisions have real consequences for real people.

The Indian legal framework, through its statutes, its courts, and its international commitments, has established that IP protection exists to serve society – not to subordinate it. Private rights are a means to that end, not an end in themselves.

What do you think? Should India’s compulsory licensing provisions be used more actively across sectors beyond pharmaceuticals – such as in educational publishing or technology patents – to address affordability concerns? And at what point does limiting patent protection discourage the very innovation that the system is designed to reward?

References

1. https://amdlawindia.com/blog/intellectual-property-laws-in-india-a-comprehensive-guide/
2. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3160532
3. https://www.makeinindia.com/policy/intellectual-property-facts
4. https://acuitylaw.co.in/faqs/intellectual-property-laws-in-india/
5. https://ijirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/COMPULSORY-LICENSING-IN-INDI-NATCO-VS-BAYER-CASE-IMPACT-IN-INDIA.pdf
6. https://patentdocs.org/2012/03/15/the-anatomy-of-a-compulsory-license-natco-pharma-ltd-v-bayer-corp-indian-patent-office/
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3884017/
8. https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/patent-controversy-resumes-as-indian-supreme-court-rejects-novartis-glivec-claim/
9. https://www.nexdigm.com/doing-business-in-india/intellectual-property.php
10. https://taxguru.in/corporate-law/balancing-intellectual-property-rights-public-interest.html
11. https://spicyip.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/IPR-Regime-In-India-Government-Initiatives.pdf