Property without a place: Intellectual property right, the Transfers of property act, and the case for a Sui Generis security framework.

Karan Singh Yadav

Property without a place: Intellectual property right, the Transfers of property act, and the case for a Sui Generis security framework.

Author(s)	Mr. Karan Singh Yadav
Country	India
Abstract	The time when the TPA Act was drafted in 1882,“property” meant land, buildings, and things you could touch. IPR did not fit that picture, and in many ways it still doesn't. Yet Indian IPR statutes — the Patents Act, the Copyright Act, the Trade Marks Act — quietly borrow the TPA 's vocabulary of “assignment,” “transfer,” and “security interest” without ever really reconciling it with the general law of property. For years, this was a gap nobody worried much about. That's changing fast. Startups are now pledging patents to raise working capital, banks are quietly experimenting with IPR-backed loans, and yet nobody seems to have a clear answer to a fairly basic question — can you actually mortgage a trademark under Section 58?Does an unregistered IPR licensee get any protection under the doctrine of part performance in Section 53A? Can a pending patent application be assigned the way an actionable claim is assigned under Section 130? This paper works through these questions one at a time. It looks closely at the statutory text — Sections 5, 53A, 58, and 130 of the TPA— against the assignment provisions in India's IPR legislation, pulls in the relevant case law where it exists (and flags where it conspicuously doesn't), and compares the position with Article 9 of the US Uniform Commercial Code, which handles IPR-as-collateral far more directly. The central argument is a fairly simple one: India's silence on this point is no longer a minor doctrinal curiosity; it's a practical obstacle to how IPR gets financed. The paper closes by weighing two ways out — stretching existing TPA doctrine through judicial interpretation, or building a dedicated statutory framework for IPR as collateral — and argues that the latter is, on balance, the more durable fix.
Keywords	IPR, TPA act, IP securitization, actionable claims, mortgage, assignment, part performance and IP-backed financing.
Field	Sociology > Administration / Law / Management
Published In	Volume 7, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-24

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Property without a place: Intellectual property right, the Transfers of property act, and the case for a Sui Generis security framework.

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