Author’s note: In an earlier version of this post, I mistakenly represented the contents of the post ‘Dodgy IP Dogma’. This has been corrected now.
SpicyIP Highlight of the Week!
The SpicyIP Highlight of the Week was the first post of the week where Madhulika reported the clandestine settlement between Natco & BMS over ‘Entecavir’. Naturally, this is a worrying development; settlements between pharmaceutical companies are bad for competition in the market because they delay the entry of generic drugs in the market. Interestingly however, the settlement (the terms of which are confidential) is not a ‘pay for delay’ settlement because Natco already has a generic version of BMS’s ‘Entecavir’ in the market.
Next, we had an extremely interesting guest post by Ms. Punam Kadam where she pondered the state of intellectual property rights in a country ridden with US economic sanctions.
After this, we published a Fellowship entry by Kiran Mary George, exploring the copyright implications of fan fiction, where she concluded that it is safe to write fan fiction so long as it is not for any commercial purpose.
On Republic Day, Professor Shamnad Basheer in a post titled ‘Dodgy IP Dogma’, lauded Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance’s latest report (dated 23/1/2015) which highlights how the concerns of the US pharmaceutical industry regarding India’s IP regime are misplaced; Professor Basheer emphasized the need for such reports to counter the “self-serving campaigns intended to paint Indian IP in a bad light”.
This was followed by two Fellowship entries by Atharva Sontakke wherein he explored the question of ownership of social media contracts in the domain of trade secret law and the inadequacies of the proposed ‘Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations’ respectively.
We had yet another brilliant Fellowship entry by Arundhati Venkataraman where she analysed the US decision in Google v. Garcia and how the outcome of the case would have been decided in the Indian context.
After this, Anubha reported the worrisome news that Prime Minister Modi has recently expressed his eagerness at accepting the “suggestions” of the Joint High Level Working Group on IP between India and United States; there is already a lot of trepidation regarding the Working Group which was constituted last year and one can only hope that the US does not find a way to bully India into accepting US’ stand on IP through the Group.
Towards the middle of the week, we announced our new set of Fellows for the year 2015-2016: Arundhati Venkataraman, Balaji Subramaniam, Kiran Mary George and Kartik Chawla. All of them sent in phenomenal Fellowship entries and we are extremely excited to have them on the team.
The last post of the week was by Kartik, where he reported that two of the issues on the agenda of the Working Group were ‘data exclusivity’ and ‘patent linkages’.
International Developments:
- Aston Martin, the company credited with designing James Bond’s cars, has sued a rival car company for trademark and design copyright infringement.
- Reddit recently published its first transparency report revealing that almost 62% of the copyright complaints that it receives are rejected for being overbroad or unlawful.
- The European Court of Justice has recently rendered an important judgment on the legal protection of databases and the applicability of contractual limitations.
- K&L Gates, a US law firm, has created Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project where it helps revenge porn victims to get their photographs taken off the internet through copyright infringement claims.
- Oscar winning film, ’12 years a slave’ has run into legal trouble for allegedly incorporating a copyrighted music composition into the film’s main musical theme.
SpicyIP Announcements:
- The World Trade Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland and the Centre for WTO Studies, Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, India are launching the 2nd WTI – CWS Joint Academy on International Trade Law and Policy (“Joint Academy”), from May 25 – June 19, 2015 at New Delhi.
- The Indian Journal of Intellectual Property Law is now accepting submissions for its 2014-15 edition.
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