October 2012 – SpicyIP

5 Reasons Why Course Packs are Legal in India

October 31, 2012 / By Amlan Mohanty / Copyright

The recent order passed against Delhi University restraining it and Rameswhari Photocopy Service from producing course packs provides the context for this post. Quite simply, the order does not even begin to consider the applicable defences and held course packs to be illegal in India. The following points demonstrate why they are in fact legal under current Indian law. Current Indian law allows reproduction in the course of instruction Section 52(1)(i)(i) of the Indian Copyright Act says ‘reproduction of a […]

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Academia struggles to pay up as Journal prices soar!

October 31, 2012 / By Swaraj Paul Barooah / Uncategorized

What is “Open Access”? Explained by PhD comics In yet another story headlining publishing houses, India’s top science officials have expressed concern over not being able to afford subscriptions to international science journals, budgeted at Rs 500 crores for the 5 year period covered by the 12th five-year plan (2012-2017). The issue is concisely captured in the quote in the LiveMint article here: ““I’ll try my best to get this (budget for journals) passed, though I doubt whether the Planning Commission

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First sale doctrine under threat in US

October 30, 2012 / By Swaraj Paul Barooah / Copyright

image from here While Hurricane Sandy has shut down most of the east coast of US, one of the only official buildings still open in Washington DC on Monday was the Supreme Court, as they heard arguments in the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons case, a case revolving around the extent of ‘protection’ that copyright owners should get. Textbook prices, it appears, are a problem world over. It makes sense. Without getting into whether it is good policy or

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Guest Post: Ownership and Assignment of Indian Patent Applications

October 29, 2012 / By Prashant Reddy / Patent

Image from here One of our long time readers, Dr. V. Shankar, has sent us this nuanced guest post on some of the oft-ignored legal & policy issues regarding the registration of title of an Indian patent especially in its pre-grant avatar. By way of introduction, Dr. Shankar is a materials engineer and a registered Indian patent agent with Maxval-IP, a company that provides services and solutions to optimize patent lifecycle management. Maxval is head-quartered in Los Altos, USA and

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Supreme Court grants BharatMatrimony stay against Shaadi.com

October 28, 2012 / By Shan Kohli / Trademark

Last week a three judge bench of the Supreme Court passed an order restraining Shaadi.com and other rival matrimonial websites from infringing BharatMatrimony’s trade mark. This was in response to a SLP filed by Consim Info P. Ltd, that whenever BharatMatrimony’s name was keyed in on Google search, the names of the rival websites appeared on the right hand side in the Ad words column. Earlier The Madras High Court had refused to pass an order restraining Google and other

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IP in the multiverse: Law of Superheroes

October 27, 2012 / By Swaraj Paul Barooah / Uncategorized

The leading American patent law blog, Patently O, reminds us that even serious law folk can have a lighter side once in a while (though not often enough, I would say). James Dailey and Ryan Davidson, bloggers of Law and the Multiverse, have turned their blog into a book “Law of Superheroes” that will be a delight to all comic-geek lawyers. As excerpted from Patently O: (T)he book answers many IP questions that may have vexed comic book readers: Does Batman’s

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Govt. of India follows up on SpicyIP reporting – revokes Avesthagen patent – first Indian victory for TKDL

October 27, 2012 / By Prashant Reddy / Patent

Image from here Six months after we had first reported on how Avesthagen was proceeding with its Indian patent application, despite abandoning the EPO equivalent of the same after objections raised by the EPO and the TKDL, the ToI has reported that the Government of India has now revoked the Indian patent in question. We had initially covered this Avesthagen patent application (1076/CHE/2007) for “synergistic ayurvedic/functional food bioactive composition” in context of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). That post

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Karnataka High Court temporarily restrains German company from exploiting trade secrets of Homag India

October 27, 2012 / By Prashant Reddy / Uncategorized

Image from here In an interesting judgment dated 10th October, 2012 the Karnataka High Court, sitting at Bangalore, has passed an interim injunction restraining IMA AG Asia Pacific PTE Ltd. (a German subsidiary based in Singapore) from exploiting the trade secrets of Homag India Ltd. the Indian subsidiary of a German company. The injunction also extends to one of the former employees of Homag India, who is alleged to have leaked the trade secrets, through his official email account, to

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Copyright Aggression vs Educational Access: The "Grammar" of Justice?

In a rather unfortunate turn of events, Delhi University (DU) and Rameshwari appear to have lost the now famous DU photocopy case that pits the public interests of students against the private interests of publishers. As reported in earlier blog posts, a leading group of publishers, including OUP, CUP and Taylor & Francis, sued a photocopying shop (Rameshwari Photocoping) and Delhi University (DU) for alleged infringement of copyrights in their books, excerpts of which were compiled into student course packs

Rebutting arguments against multiple copyright societies

Image from here. In response to my last post, I received a dismissive comment from Achille Forler, an insider from the music industry, who like most other folks from the music industry consider any commentary from outsiders as ‘pointless’. In any case, we on the blog seem to be much more receptive of criticism and I’ve taken the time out to rebut each one of the points raised by Forler. Forler’s comments are in red below, with mine in black:

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