Author name: Arundathi Venkataraman

The highlight of the week goes to Prashant’s guest post where he throws light on the on-goings in the drug-regulatory arena in India. He notes that the Ministry of Commerce has stepped in, not one but twice, to undercut the Ministry of Health, sabotaging the latter’s efforts to strengthen central regulation of the Indian pharmaceutical industry on several levels. He notes that the Ministry of Commerce has continually spoken out of turn. In the cases of Ranbaxy’s penalty by the USFDA

We covered a wonderfully wide variety of concepts over this past week – a dual takedown of PPL and IPRS, Net Neutrality, Trade Secrets, Copyright in light of parodies, more comments on the Draft IPR Policy, Open Source Software, FRAND Litigation, a new centre for IP and Plagiarism. However, the highlight of the week goes to Rupali’s powerful two-part post analyzing Shreya Singhal. In the first part, she briefly discusses the findings in relation to Section 66A and 69A of

In the highlight of this week, Shamnad Sir reported a victory in his writ petition before the Madras High Court which challenged the constitutionality of provisions relating to the Intellectual Property Appellate Board (IPAB). In this first round, which started in 2011, critical provisions of the Trademarks Act which provide for the establishment of the Board were struck down as unconstitutional. Shamnad Sir wrote that the Court held the provision providing for government officers to be elected as judicial members

The highlight of the week was Kartik’s two-part post where he provided a hard-hitting, break-down analysis of the GIPC Index, 2015. In the first part he highlighted that the goal of the Index is to appease major industry lobbies, much like last year. With the focus on the pharmaceutical industry, he argues that a baselines assumption is established without really explaining how that helps innovation. He also opines that the Index turns a blind eye to the relationship between IP