A Short History of Intellectual Property Law

Intellectual property is बौद्धिक सम्पत्ति in Nepali. The idea is old, the Nepali statute is not: Venice granted patents in 1474, and Nepal's own law arrived on 30 August 1965. It has been amended exactly twice since.

Key takeaways

• बौद्धिक सम्पत्ति is intellectual property; औद्योगिक सम्पत्ति is industrial property.
• Nepal's statute is पेटेण्ट डिजायन र ट्रेडमार्क ऐन, २०२२, the Patent, Design and Trade Mark Act 1965.
• It was authenticated on 14 Bhadra 2022 BS, which is 30 August 1965 in the Gregorian calendar.
• Two amendments in sixty years: 18 October 1987 and 24 November 2006.
• The 2006 amendment wrote the Paris Convention into Sec. 21C, five years after Nepal joined it.
• Nepal holds only three WIPO-administered treaties and is outside Madrid, the PCT and Hague.
• The Act covers patents, designs and trade marks only. Copyright sits in a separate Act of 2002.

What is intellectual property called in Nepali?

The umbrella term is बौद्धिक सम्पत्ति, which is the phrase the National Intellectual Property Policy uses in its own title.

The narrower family that the Department of Industry handles is औद्योगिक सम्पत्ति, industrial property, and that is the name of the Department's own section.

The individual rights keep their borrowed names in the statute, which is why the Act's Nepali title reads पेटेण्ट डिजायन र ट्रेडमार्क.

Both ट्रेडमार्क and व्यापार चिन्ह are official. The Department's application form carries them together, so either is safe in correspondence.

Where does intellectual property law begin?

In Venice, in 1474, with a statute that promised a limited monopoly to anyone who brought a new and ingenious device to the city and registered it.

What makes it the starting point is not the privilege, which rulers had granted for centuries, but the rule: a general law, open to any inventor, rather than a favour for a named person.

Everything since is a variation on that bargain. Disclose the thing, get a limited exclusive right, and let it fall into public hands afterwards.

Why did England matter next?

Because it did the opposite job. The Statute of Monopolies of 1624 was written to abolish the Crown's grants of trade monopolies, and it carved out an exception for genuine new inventions.

That exception became patent law. The principle has stuck for four centuries: a patent is a tolerated monopoly, justified only by novelty and public benefit.

Copyright arrived in the same tradition with the Statute of Anne in 1710, which moved the right from the printers' guild to the author and gave it a fixed term.

How did intellectual property law become international?

Through two conventions signed three years apart. The Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, agreed in 1883, covers patents, designs and marks.

The Berne Convention followed in 1886 for literary and artistic works. Between them they established the idea that a right recognised at home should be respected abroad.

Both are administered today by WIPO, and Nepal is a party to each. Our note on WIPO and Nepal sets out what that membership does and does not buy.

When did the modern institutions appear?

Later than most people assume. The Nice Agreement on trademark classification dates from 1957, and the system it created had only 42 classes for its first forty-five years.

WIPO itself came from a convention signed in 1967 that took effect in 1970, folding the older Paris and Berne bureaux into one organisation.

The last great shift was 1995, when the TRIPS Agreement made minimum standards a condition of world trade. Our guide to the 45 classes follows that thread.

What did Nepal have before 1965?

No register, no examination and no certificate. A maker's reputation could identify goods in a bazaar, but nothing recorded who owned a name.

That is not the same as saying nobody cared. It means there was no way to prove a claim to a stranger, in another district, years later.

Registration is exactly that: a dated public record that outlives memory. Everything the Department of Industry does today rests on that one function.

When did Nepal's own IP law arrive?

On 14 Bhadra 2022 BS, which is 30 August 1965. The Act was authenticated and published on that date, and it has governed patents, designs and trade marks ever since.

Its preamble is short and commercial: it was necessary to update the legal arrangements for patents, designs and trade-marks for the convenience and economic benefit of the general public.

It was enacted by King Mahendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev on the aid and advice of the National Panchayat. The state that passed it has gone; the statute has not.

What does the 1965 Act actually cover?

Three rights, and no more. Patents are Chapter 2, designs and trade marks follow, and the Department of Industry administers all of them.

Copyright is not in it. Nepal's copyright statute is a separate Act of 2002, which is why an author and an inventor deal with different offices.

Read the rights side by side in our guide to the types of intellectual property before deciding which one your work needs.

What is missing from the Act?

A great deal, and it is better to know than to guess. Search the Act's text for "geographical", "indication", "collective" or "certification" as a mark category and you find nothing.

So Nepal has no geographical indication register, no collective mark and no certification mark of the kind other countries issue, as far as we can see on the official texts. The usual route is an ordinary mark owned by one legal person, with users permitted in writing.

The history of those categories elsewhere is still worth reading, and our piece on Champagne, Scotch and Darjeeling covers it. Treat any question about their legal effect here as one for an advocate.

What did the 1987 First Amendment change?

A lot of the trade mark machinery. The First Amendment was dated Kartik 1, 2044, which is 18 October 1987, and the consolidated text marks around twenty provisions as its work.

One of them is the definition itself. Sec. 2(c) now reads that a trade-mark means a word, symbol or picture, or a combination of them, used by any firm, company or individual to distinguish its products or services from others.

Section 18A, the classification rule, carries the same period. It lets the Government classify goods and services by notification in the Nepal Gazette, and requires a separate application for each category.

What did the 2006 amendment change?

It connected the statute to the outside world. The amending Act of 24 November 2006 has an unglamorous name: an Act made to amend some Nepal Acts relating to export and import and intellectual property.

Its most telling insertion sits in Sec. 21C, which now says the Department shall provide the facility pursuant to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property 1883 to the registration holder.

That is the only treaty named anywhere in the Act, and it was written in five years after Nepal had already joined the convention. Law followed practice, not the other way round.

Which treaties has Nepal joined?

Three, all administered by WIPO, and each recorded with a date. The WIPO Convention entered into force for Nepal on 4 February 1997.

The Paris Convention followed on 22 June 2001, and the Berne Convention on 11 January 2006. Nepal also acceded to the World Trade Organization on 23 April 2004, which brought the TRIPS obligations with it.

Those four dates are the whole of Nepal's treaty position in this field. Re-check them against WIPO's own tables before relying on one, because the tables are republished.

Which treaties has Nepal not joined?

The three that would let one filing reach many countries. Nepal is outside the Madrid System for trade marks, the Patent Cooperation Treaty for patents and the Hague System for designs.

The practical effect is blunt. A foreign owner cannot extend an international registration here, and a Nepali applicant cannot file an international application from here either.

Nepal is not even a party to the Nice Agreement, although the Department uses the Nice class list in practice. Joining a classification treaty and applying a classification are separate acts.

Where does copyright sit in the story?

In its own statute. The Copyright Act of 2002 arrived four years before Nepal joined Berne, and it is where authors, musicians and software writers look.

It is worth knowing that the copyright statute does not cross-reference the convention by name, so the relationship between the two is a question for a lawyer rather than a reading of the text.

IP Sewa does not file copyright. Our work is the industrial property side that the Department of Industry administers.

Is there a national IP policy?

Yes. The National Intellectual Property Policy, राष्ट्रिय बौद्धिक सम्पत्ति नीति, 2073 BS, sits alongside the statute and is published through the Department of Industry.

A policy is not a statute. It states intentions about institutions, awareness and incentives; it does not create a right you can register or enforce.

So read any policy document, and any proposal for a new industrial property bill, as a statement of direction. Until a bill is passed and published, the 1965 Act is the law.

Who administers all of this today?

The Department of Industry. It receives applications, examines them, publishes accepted trade marks in the Industrial Property Bulletin and issues the registration certificate.

Patents take a different route: the Act has registered patents published in the Nepal Gazette, not the Bulletin, which is a distinction many summaries get wrong.

Our explainer on the Department as Nepal's IP office and our guide to reading the Bulletin cover the day-to-day machinery.

What does this history mean when you file today?

It means the paperwork is national, the deadlines are statutory, and nothing about your rights abroad carries over automatically.

1. Search before you commit. Nepal works on a first-to-file basis in practice, so an earlier application beats earlier use. Start with the published trademark search.
2. Pick the right right. An invention, an appearance and a brand are three different applications under the same Act.
3. Classify the goods. Sec. 18A(2) requires a separate application for each category, so use the class finder before counting cost.
4. File in Nepal, directly. There is no Madrid or PCT route in, so a foreign owner appoints a local representative by power of attorney.
5. Watch the publication. The opposition window runs from publication, and a missed window is a lost objection.
6. Diarise the renewal term. A trade mark runs seven years from registration and must be renewed to stay alive.

Common mistakes

• Assuming an old right survives. Long use in a bazaar is not a registration and never was.
• Reading a foreign registration as global. Nepal is outside every international filing system.
• Treating the policy as the law. A नीति states intentions; an ऐन creates rights.
• Looking for patents in the Bulletin. The Act publishes registered patents in the Nepal Gazette.
• Expecting a GI certificate. There is no such register in the Act as far as we can see.
• Confusing the two offices. The Company Registrar records companies; the Department registers marks.

A worked example

This is an illustration, not a real case. A Bhaktapur workshop has sold metal lamps under one family name since the 1970s and now finds the name on a competitor's boxes.

The workshop's age helps commercially and does very little legally, because nothing was ever registered and the law has been registration-based since 1965.

Three rights might have applied: a trade mark for the name, an industrial design for the lamp's shape, and a patent only if a mechanism were genuinely new and useful.

The lesson the history teaches is unromantic. Sixty years of trading built the goodwill; one dated application would have protected it. Our note on IP disputes in Nepal covers what happens next.

In short

The idea of a registered, limited monopoly is five and a half centuries old. Nepal's version of it is sixty, and it has been amended twice.

The vocabulary is worth keeping: बौद्धिक सम्पत्ति for the whole field, औद्योगिक सम्पत्ति for the part the Department of Industry runs, and पेटेण्ट डिजायन र ट्रेडमार्क ऐन, २०२२ for the statute itself.

The practical consequence has not changed since 1965. Rights here come from a dated national filing, not from reputation and not from a registration granted somewhere else.

The Act is published by the Nepal Law Commission and applied by the Department of Industry. Start with intellectual property law in Nepal if you want the current rules rather than the story.

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If the story has left you with a live question about a name, an invention or a product shape, we can tell you what is already published and what is worth filing. See trademark registration, patent registration or industrial design, or ask us through contact.