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 conducting complaint-based raids, and of an increase in use of judicial orders that have strengthened enforcement against pirated movies and music online. The United States encourages India to take additional steps to improve coordination with enforcement officials of Indian state governments. To strengthen engagement on these and other copyright issues, and to build upon the strengths of the vibrant Indian and U.S. copyright-intensive industries, including in movies, music, and software, the United States would welcome closer bilateral cooperation with India to address the challenges of copyright piracy of U.S. and Indian content globally, including, for example, through cooperation and exchanges at the technical level between copyright protection and enforcement experts in each government.

Patents & Regulatory Data Protection

The United States continues to encourage India to promote an efficient, transparent, and predictable patent system that nurtures and incentivizes innovation. As leading economies with strong traditions of innovation, India and the United States can and should ensure supportive, enabling environments for innovators at all stages of the innovation lifecycle to achieve success and contribute significantly to economic growth. The United States commends India on actions taken in recent years to improve the operations of its Patent Office, which included digitizing records, upgrading online search and e-filing capabilities, and hiring additional patent examiners. The United States understands that, per the recommendation under the First Draft of India's National IPR Policy, India will continue to focus on patent administration issues that aim to increase human resource development, training, use of technology, and address other capacity issues. India's demonstrated commitment to address these issues will help promote efficiency, transparency, and predictability in patent administration in India, to the benefit of domestic and foreign innovators, and to India overall. The United States also welcomes April 2015 statements made by Prime Minister Modi recommending that India align its patent laws with international standards and encourages India expeditiously undertake this initiative.

With respect to patents, the United States continues to have serious concerns about the innovation climate for the biopharmaceutical and other sectors, such as agricultural chemical and green technology. Innovators in these sectors face serious challenges in securing and enforcing patents in India. This is not only detrimental to these commercial interests, but also to India's effort to address pressing domestic policy challenges, as it may discourage companies from entering the Indian market, or engaging in the kinds of voluntary and mutually agreed technology development and transfer that India is seeking domestically and in multilateral fora. The United States urges India to reject policies and practices that amount to barriers that will adversely affect not only American companies, but Indian companies as well. The United States encourages India to instead adopt policies that both address domestic challenges and support the cutting-edge innovation that can be critical to meeting legitimate domestic policy goals.

For example, a patent system should encourage the development of inventions that meet the well-established international criteria, enshrined in the TRIPS Agreement, of being new, involving an inventive step, and being capable of industrial application. Consistent with this, 48