SpicyIP Highlight of the Week!
Earlier sometime in February, Shamnad and Swaraj, in an Indian Express Op-Ed had written on the problematic GIPC Report 2014 which banished India to the last position in terms of innovation and IP protection offered by it; interestingly enough, Mr. P. Pugatch of the Pugatch Consilium (which conducted the GIPC Report) has in what seems to be a reply to the earlier Op-Ed vociferously emphasized the significance of the contentious report. In an interestingly titled blog, ‘Of shadowboxing and Strawmen’, Swaraj hits backs at the GIPC Report as being far from an indicator of how India can improve its innovative capacity.
Last week started with Chris Ohly, a leading patent litigator in US and one of our regular guest bloggers, writing a post on Macronix International, Ltd. v. Spansion, Inc. (2014) where a US Court applied the heightened pleadings standards in case of patent complaints; he observed that this approach of the US Court will be “a useful and productive means of reducing the time and expense consumed in suits for alleged infringement of pharmaceutical patents.”
Exploring a topic not covered extensively on SpicyIP before, another guest blogger, Kartik Chawla of NALSAR, wrote an interesting post on network neutrality where he has analysed the arguments for and against network neutrality, the recent Netflix-Comcast deal and the position in India regarding the same; ‘network neutrality’ is the idea that “an Internet Service Provider (ISP) cannot charge different consumers different prices for different speeds” and this is in keeping with the idea of an open internet.
The first part of NLU- Delhi’s Colloquium on Selected IP Issues concluded successfully on March 19, 2014; eminent panellists from across the country spoke on “Early Market Entry of Biosimilars in India: Implications of the Roche/Mylan Dispute”.
Mathews reported that EU is expected to finalize and formally approve the draft legislation on clinical trials by 2nd April, 2014. A noteworthy feature of the draft legislation is ‘transparency’, i.e. it places an obligation on those carrying out the trials to make the trial data freely accessible to the public.
Kartik again drew our attention to another very interesting development where the Tamil Nadu State government is contemplating mandatory installation of Boss Linux (Bharat Operating Systems Solution) in the state government offices; Boss Linux is an Open Source Software developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC). Kartik has observed that the government must keep in mind the security concerns behind implementation of the same.
We then had Rajiv discuss a recent decision of a Paris court in a case between Micromax and Ericsson wherein the court has denied grant of injunction against Micromax on the ground that where parties to a proposed license agreement (for SEP-standard essential patents) agree on geographical and technological scope of the license, but only financial terms remain to be agreed, an injunction against licensee would confer an unjustified advantage on the patentee.
Aparajita reported the recent Delhi HC decision in the case between alcoholic beverage manufacturers, Ricard and Real House Distillery where the Delhi HC has highlighted that the ‘class of consumers’ is an important factor in deciding cases of deceptive similarity in trademarks.
A CCI order dated 11th March, 2014 has held that JCB, India’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment has abused its dominant market position by indulging in vexatious litigation to curb competition. This was reported by Aparajita here.
International Developments:
On the international front, the 20th Annual Pharma Summit held latterly in London, witnessed picketing by AIDS activists who protested against Big Pharma’s interference in South African Patent law reforms which have caused life-saving drugs to be priced exorbitantly in South Africa.
On a light note, a US magician has been successful in restraining a Belgian entertainer form copying his illusion trick on the ground that it infringed his copyright.
Taking a cue from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland is toying with the idea of bringing down college textbook rates by introducing “open source” electronic textbooks; unlike traditional e-textbooks which are sold by publishers for a fee, open-source textbooks accumulate materials from various sources and are freely available to the public, without fear of copyright infringement.
With this, we come to the end of the SpicyIP review for this week. To ensure that you don’t miss any spice in IP, subscribe to SpicyIP now!
