SpicyIP Accolades: A Big Thank You to Our Readers

It turns out that May has proved a good month for SpicyIP on other counts as well. We have been selected as a top IP blog by Lexis Nexis in every category of IP i.e. patent, copyrights and trademarks. Please see here (for Patents), here (for Trademarks) and here (for Copyrights). After you open these links, do scroll down on the page and open the drop-down menu and click on label titled “Top Blogs.”

In their letter to us, Lexis Nexis writes:

“The selection of your blog was made by the Team responsible for the Matthew Bender publications as one of those most often visited, referred to and relied upon. We take pride in associating with the best talent in the legal world, so we are thrilled to include you as part of this dynamic new platform that features commentary from experts and gives visitors to the site the ability to interact with the content and one another.”

We have provided links to the Lexis Nexis IP sites in the “links” section of our blog. We encourage our readers to visit these pages. In particular, we encourage you to participate in the discussion area, under the “Insider Perspective” heading (as either a conversation starter or by commenting on topics already posted, by signing in and creating a user profile.)

We’ve been selected as a useful online IP resource by the US Library of Congress. We also recently featured in this MIP (Managing Intellectual Property) List of leading blogs. Please see here and here.

Sumathi Chandrasekharan and Satyam vs Upaid

Many of our readers will recollect that the press in India picked up extensively on Sumathi’s Satyam vs Upaid story–so much so that this article here in DNA copies many of her lines verbatim. More recently, an article by Bala Shah in Techgoss explicitly recognises her role in reporting this story. The author notes in particular that:

“Respected Indian blog //spicyipindia.blogspot.com was the first in India to pick up the story and report it in a way that made sense to people with no legal backgrounds. The SpicyIP story by Sumathi Chandrashekaran was soon picked up by national media like Times of India and DNA and now Business Standard.

But this was certainly another case where the new media of blogs picked up an idea and set high standards for others to follow.”

SpicyIP Petition to Government for Patent Database

Our transparency petition calling for an online patent database finally elicited a response from the government. We blogged on this here and here. As we’d requested in these posts, if any of you have comments on the usability or otherwise of these databases, please write to us. You can either post your comment directly on the blog posts or write to me at shamnad[at]gmail.com. Interestingly, last evening we received an email from someone at the EPO, the contents of which I reproduce below:

“At the European Patent Office we have warmly welcomed the launching of the online service to access the Indian patent documentation. We have seen at your blog (http://spicyipindia.blogspot.com/2008/05/indian-patent-database-relevant-links.html) that one can now access both patent applications and granted patents. We would be curious to know more about the current coverage of these databases and if new documents are being regularly added in order to extend this coverage. Could you give us some information on this?

Moreover, we have noticed that for granted patent, the database gives sometimes access to the complete specification in PDF format, but this does not seem to happen in the case of the patent applications. May we ask you to confirm this point? And if it is so, are you aware of any plan to include an online access to the complete application in PDF? We will be looking forward to hear from you on these matters.”

We replied stating that since this is an ongoing process, there are several patent documents that are being uploaded as we speak (which explains why you might get some patents but not others).

A Big Thank You!

None of the above achievements would have been possible without the participation and encouragement of our readers. We therefore wish to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt gratitude to each one of you.

Many of you have been keeping us on our toes with your incisive comments and searching queries. Some of the comments in the recent past have been vitriolic and have bordered on the personal—but we appreciate that this is but a small price to pay for the greater cause of spreading awareness around IP issues, promoting transparency and helping set the platform for optimal IP policy formulation in India.

Swaraj Barooah: A New Addition to our Family

We are happy to announce that we’ve recruited yet another bright law student to our blog. Swaraj Barooah is a final year law student at NALSAR and we carried a guest post from him on DRM. He comes with some serious IT skills as well–so you can expect more offerings from SpicyIP in the near future. Please welcome him to our team.