Whiling away some time on the internet, I decided to check Google Trends – which ranks countries based on the frequency of the search term entered – for ‘patents’, ‘copyrights’, ‘ipr’, ‘intellectual property rights’, ‘intellectual property laws’, etc. To my surprise, I found that, with the exception of one or two search terms, India is far, far ahead of any other country for almost every IP-related search term!
Even for terms where India was not on top, such as ‘trademarks’, ‘innovation’, ‘invention’ – India was within the top few countries where the term has been searched for.
Even for terms where India was not on top, such as ‘trademarks’, ‘innovation’, ‘invention’ – India was within the top few countries where the term has been searched for.
Makes one wonder why there’s so much curiousity about IP – relatively and absolutely – in India! Any comments from readers on this?
[Of course, here at Spicy IP, we’d like to believe we’ve had a role to play 😉 ]
Hi Swaraj,
Nice Observation!!! However, I feel that there is nothing great about it. I don’t know the calculation parameters of Google Trends, but I’m sure that they are not taking into consideration the Population of corresponding countries while scoring the final figure for ranking. Just divide the final figure with population factor to obtain the proportional results. I’m sure India would rank much below then most of the countries. I know the IP awareness is increasing at fast rate in India and that should apparently go up in future too. But this is certainly a false positive result in the Experiment which is caused due to not consideration of relevant factors.
Best Regards,
Ashwani
The results seem obvious to me with ever increasing number of students in field of Law, especially in IPR. The pace at which the Legal Outsourcing market is growing and growing awareness among research institutes to protect their IP could also be major factors.
awareness is growing i must say..
Was meant to be more of a mere observation than a positive or a negative on any scale – as pointed out by the open ended question at the end. 🙂 However, I’m not sure about the population index being a factor – because then you’d have to take into account the number of people with internet access rather than population. Too many variables to really say what, if anything this means.. except what it is. India being ahead of other countries on google trends! 🙂