SpicyIP Highlight of the Week!
On 30th April, India signed the ‘Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (MVT)’ which allows for better access to published works by the visually impaired. This is indeed a welcome move to address the problem of “book famine” which is faced by those who are visually impaired or print disabled; India’s copyright laws being already in harmony with the Treaty makes for easy implementation of MVT.
In the beginning of last week, Natco filed a pre-grant opposition to Gilead’s application to patent Sovaldi in India; the opposition was filed on the ground that the drug is not “inventive”.
Another pharmaceutical giant Novartis succeeded in obtaining quia timet injunctions against four generic drugs makers in order to safeguard its anti-diabetic drug Galvus.
In an interesting guest post, Kartik Chawla, blogged about NETmundial, the global multistakeholder meeting on the future of internet governance.
Gopika and Aparajitha analysed the recent decision of the Madras High Court in Standard Corporation India Ltd. v. Tractors and Farm Equipment Ltd. while exploring the anomalous relation between copyright and design.
We also had Rajiv summarize the Motorola and Samsung competition law cases which were decided by the European Commission on April 29th; the European Commission also issued guidelines for licensing SEPs under FRAND terms.
Next we had Anubha reporting on the Special 301 Report which was released amid speculation as to whether India would receive PFC (Priority Foreign Country) status or not; it turns out that India, though not listed in the PFC category will be subjected to an OCR (Out-of-Cycle Review).
Some IP developments on the international front:
- Ironically, the Marxist Internet Archive, a website which has archived works of radical thinkers was recently threatened with copyright infringement by Lawrence & Wishart (a small leftist publisher) for publishing the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on their website; the Marxist Internet Archive complied with the said warning and removed thousands of works of Marx & Engels on May 1st (International Worker’s Day).
- In United States, men’s rights activists are opposing the copyright granted by a Virginia judge to a woman; the copyright has been granted on a suicide note written by the woman’s husband and the said copyright authorizes her to preclude others from posting the contents of the suicide letter online.
- In Australia, the introduction of ‘fair use’ exception in the Australian Copyright Act is being mulled over by the Parliament which is also being opposed by US film, music and publishing industries; at present, the Australian Copyright Act provides for the narrower exception of ‘fair dealing’.
- In an interesting ongoing case, a district court in United States is grappling with the issue of allowing copyright protection on designs of cheerleading uniforms while addressing the bigger issue of whether the design of a cheerleader’s costume is severable from the utilitarian function of the costume.
- The Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) has announced in its Special 301 Report that it has removed Philippines from its Special 301 Watch List; Philippines first appeared in the report in 1989.
SpicyIP Events:
- We would like to inform our readers that IT Legal Summit 2014 will be held in Bangalore on 22nd May, the details of which are available here.
- Also, INTA’s 136th Annual Meeting (for which online registrations closed on May 2nd) will be held in Hong Kong from 10th to 14th May, 2014.
- The 2nd IJLT-SFLC Law & Technology Essay Competition 2014 is being organized by NLSIU and entries for the same are to be submitted by June 20th, 2014. Further details are available here.
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