The SpicyIP Story of the Week is Swaraj’s post titled Stalling Scientific Progress with Chilly Copyright Censure which discusses the disturbing incident of Diego Gomez, a Columbian student who is facing criminal charges for making available in public an academic paper that helps conservationists in their field of study.
Last week, we had written about Thomson Reuters’ puzzling copyright policy that purports to allow your content (that you created), become an unrelated party’s property unless you sent them an email stating that you’d like to keep your copyright over it. This week we carried a Guest Post by Abhishek Pandurangi that further analyses the legal implications of such a policy, from the perspectives of the Copyright Act and the Indian Contract Act.
I then blogged about two developments in the field of Domain Names– First, that the Indian Government has finally decided to open up new “.bharath” Generic Top-Level Domain Names (gTLDs) in Indian scripts to supplement the ‘.in’ domain name, such as .भारत (Devnagiri), .భారత్ (Telugu), .بھارت (urdu), etc. In related news, it has come to light that Reliance has withdrawn their application for the Domain Name ‘.indians’.
Anubha then brought to us a case comment on the M/S Allied Blenders & Distillers case. It was an interesting case where the Court relied on consumer psychology and associative thinking in order to come to the conclusion that a ‘Collector’ could be confused with an ‘Officer’ (in the context of trademark over the brand of Whisky named ‘Collector’s Choice’).
This was followed by Shamnad’s post on the death of Mr. Chris Ohly, a reputed IP Lawyer. Shamnad shares his experiences interacting with Mr. Ohly as a fellow lawyer, academic and dear friend.
We then had another Guest Post on the recent Amendments to the Karnataka Goondas Act (see Part 1 of the post which we carried last week, here) by Nehaa Chaudhari and Amulya Purushotama. This post looks at the Amendments from the Constitutional angle of legislative competence.
The Week ended with Madhulika’s analysis of the IPO’s Revised Draft Guidelines for Examination of Pharmaceutical Patents. She stresses that these guidelines are not, as widely stated in the media, amendments to Patent Law but mere guidelines that do not prevail over the Patents Act.
SpicyIP Events and Announcements:
1) The Indian Journal of Law and Technology (IJLT) is inviting submissions for its 11th Volume to be published in 2015.
2) The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is hosting the 4th Edition of he Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest at New Delhi, India. The event will be tentatively scheduled in the first two weeks of December, 2015. For more details, click here.
International Developments
1) In an interesting case dealing with Social Media and IP, Ferrari is suing a young fan who created a Ferrari Fan page on facebook when he was 15, for violation of trademark and copyright.
2) A Group of Civil Society Organisations in Africa have come together to draft the African Declaration of Internet Rights and Freedoms. Our readers might remember that earlier this year, the Brazilian government passed a groundbreaking piece of legislation that was termed the a Bill of Rights for Brazil’s Internet.
