COMMERCIALIZATION OF SPACE ACTIVITIES AND IPR ISSUES IN INDIA: CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

Abstract

The Indian Space Policy 2023 has brought about a structural change in India's space ecosystem by bringing to an end the previous system in which the state had a monopoly, leading to an increase from a single startup in 2014 to about 440 registered space technology firms supported by a total of USD 618.5 million in private equity. Nevertheless, this drive towards commercialization is encountering a fundamental regulatory obstacle: the conflict between national intellectual property rights (IPR) systems, which are based on territoriality, and the borderless, non-appropriable nature of outer space as defined by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. By means of a data-driven analysis, this paper points out a significant gap in the market: even though private non-governmental entities (NGEs) constitute the majority of new companies entering the sector, they account for less than 5% of all active domestic space-tech patents (IPC: B64G), causing them to depend heavily on technology transfers from the public sector, which do not offer clear exclusivity or protection in orbit. Moreover, fast-growing downstream sectors such as Earth Observation (EO) analytics operate in a legal grey area under the Indian Patents Act, 1970, and the Copyright Act, 1957, making proprietary hardware upgrades and structured satellite telemetry particularly prone to cross-border infringement and unauthorized data scraping. To address this regulatory gap, the paper proposes specific, practical legislative measures.