For founders, MSMEs and corporate R&D
Every enquiry is under NDA before anything technical is shared
Two questions decide whether your IP is an asset or a line item. What stops somebody copying you, and what stops somebody stopping you? Both have documented answers, and both are cheaper to arrange now than to explain in a data room.
Track record
Twelve years of filing and prosecution behind every engagement — and offices in Vadodara, Sangli, Udaipur and Montreal.
Roughly one in twenty industrial designs registered in the country passes through this practice. For a manufacturer, design is usually the right first right — it is fast, and it protects the thing that actually gets copied.
Product-side design work for a manufacturer — representation sheets from production drawings, novelty tested against live competitors.
Case studyProtection through to a commercial outcome, not a certificate in a drawer.
The design-filing share is our own filing count over the period against the Controller General’s published total for the same period. It is a measure of filing volume, not a claim about any particular sector.
The pattern
None of these are unusual. All four turn up in the same conversation, usually two weeks before a term sheet or a trade fair.
A trade fair, a pitch deck, a LinkedIn post. Public disclosure can destroy novelty permanently — and by the time anyone checks, the window has closed.
Without a written assignment, the person who wrote the code or drew the part may hold rights in it. Diligence finds this every time.
Most manufacturers are copied on how a product appears long before anyone reverse-engineers how it works. That is a design registration, not a patent.
Owning a right and being free to sell are different questions. A live third-party claim can stop a launch you have already tooled for.
The work
Drafting, filing and prosecution end to end — plus the searching that should happen before any of it.
Provisional or complete specifications, drafted to claim what you actually built, and prosecuted through examination.
Patent registrationProtection for how the product looks. Fast, and the right first filing for most manufacturers.
Design registrationThe brand, in the classes that matter — including the ones your competitors already hold.
Trademark registrationSoftware, manuals, artwork and content — the assets most companies never think to register.
Copyright registrationWhether live patents stand between your product and your market, read at claim level.
FTO serviceOne application that holds your date across 150+ states while you decide where to pay.
PCT filingWhere you sit
A funded startup, a manufacturer and a corporate R&D team are buying for different reasons. The right first step is not the same for all three.
Investors will ask what stops a copy. File the core right, register the brand, and get contractor assignments in writing before the data room opens.
Start with design registration on the products that get copied, then a trademark on the brand. Both are fast, and both give you something to enforce.
Freedom to operate before tooling, a portfolio review of what you already hold, and a watch on the field once you are in the market.
For the data room
Diligence rarely fails because a company owns nothing. It fails because nobody can prove what it owns, or because ownership sits somewhere else.
The other half
Protection is a cost until something is earned from it. Filings that sit unused are the most expensive thing on an IP budget.
IP BANK India works as a brokered service — we look for the buyer or licensee rather than waiting for one to arrive. Valuation, negotiation and the paperwork of transfer are handled in-house.
A Rs. 42 lakh copyright transfer on an Android application, a healthcare patent taken through technology transfer, and 106 industrial designs released for public use.
We do not publish a package price, because a single design registration and a five-country patent programme are not comparable pieces of work. Tell us what you make and where you sell, and you will get a written scope with the professional fee and the official fee shown separately.
Official government fees are always quoted separately from professional fees. Reduced official fees apply to individuals, startups and small entities — we check whether you qualify before quoting.
One design registration is a different engagement from a patent, a brand and a portfolio review.
Rights are national. India only, or India plus the markets you export to.
Prior art, freedom to operate, or straight to filing on something already cleared.
A launch date, a trade fair or a term sheet compresses the work and changes the resourcing.
Objections and FER replies, renewals, and whether you want the field watched.
Straight answers
Before any public disclosure, and as early as you can describe the invention properly — those two conditions usually arrive at the same moment. A provisional application is the normal answer: it secures a priority date while the product is still moving, and gives you twelve months to file the complete specification once the design has settled. Filing after a demo day, a pitch to a room of strangers or a product launch is the most common and least recoverable mistake we see.
Quite possibly. The Indian Patent Office charges reduced official fees to natural persons, startups and small entities, and the reduction is substantial rather than token. Eligibility turns on how the applicant is constituted and, for startups, on recognition status and age. We check this before quoting, because the answer changes the official-fee half of your budget considerably.
It depends on what gets copied first, and for most businesses that is the brand or the look, not the mechanism. If you sell a physical product whose appearance is distinctive, design registration is usually the fastest protection available. If you are building a name customers will ask for, the trademark matters more. A patent protects how something works — essential when that is the differentiator, and slower to obtain than either of the others.
It asks whether live patents or published applications in your markets have claims your product might fall within — a completely different question from whether your own idea is new. You need it before you commit money that cannot be recovered: tooling, a production run, a launch date, a distribution agreement. The FTO page explains what a study covers and what it cannot do.
Without a written assignment, possibly not you. In several categories the creator holds rights by default, and a services invoice is not an assignment. This is the single most common defect found in diligence, and it is straightforward to fix while the relationship is good and almost impossible once it is not. Any IP review we run checks contractor and employee agreements as a matter of course.
Not quite you?
Talk to an IP expert
Fifteen minutes is usually enough to tell you which right matters first and what it will take. If you already have filings, bring the numbers.