March 2015

New Wikileaks of TPP Investment chapter

/ By / Drug Regulation, Others, Patent

Earlier this morning, Wikileaks put out a draft Investment chapter of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, dated 20th January, 2015. To quote Julian Assange on this: “The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies.” We’ve previously written about the leaked IP chapter […]

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SpicyIP Tidbit – Facebook Denied Patent for Crawler in India

/ By / Patent

According to the Financial Express, Facebook’s patent application for its Crawler, filed in 2007, has been denied by the Indian Patent Office, as the ‘inventive step’ requirement had not been met. The algorithm was not originally designed by Facebook, but was assigned to Facebook from Truveo Inc., a search engine for internet videos, which had originally filed for the patent. A crawler is an algorithm-based software/automated script which scours all the websites online that it can reach for data –

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SpicyIP Tidbit: Supreme court stays Delhi High court injunction restraining Glenmark

/ By / Patent

In a rather interesting turn of events the Supreme Court bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and          NV Ramana have stayed the Delhi High court order restraining Glenmark from selling Sitagliptin. We had analyzed the Delhi High court injunction order restraining Glenmark in detail over here. According to livemint, Merck, resisted the stay of the high court order. However the apex court said that since there had been no stay for a long time, a few more

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Kindling embers or scorching the earth? Amazon’s foray into crowd-assisted publishing [Part I]

/ By / Copyright

Earlier this month, Amazon opened its new Kindle Write On service to the public. Write On is a platform in which authors can release manuscripts to the public for free, and get feedback from the crowd on their work. The model is similar to the more established WattPad, and is seen as its direct competitor. The fact that Amazon is entering the self-publication arena is an interesting development, but it pales in significance when you realise what else the company

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Kindling embers or scorching the earth? Amazon’s foray into crowd-assisted publishing [Part II]

/ By / Copyright

In my previous post, I discussed the impact of two new services launched by Amazon – Write On and Scout – on the content market in general, and readers in particular. Here, I take a look at what these services mean for authors. The Write On Terms of Use are fairly straightforward, and clearly states that users do not, by posting content on the platform, transfer the intellectual property in their works to Amazon. Instead, they are assumed to grant

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India puts Draft Model Bilateral Investment Treaty up for comments

/ By / Others, Patent

MyGov.in, the government’s online platform for ‘Citizen Participation towards Good Governance’, has a Draft Indian Model Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) text that is up for comments till 5pm, April 10th 2015. The platform has in fact made it very easy to comment by providing a comment box type feature not too different from most websites’ comments feature. You can find the text as well as the place to comment at this link here. I’ve just skimmed through the text so

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Guest Post: Shouldn’t We Liberate Laws from the Clutches of Copyright Law?

/ By / Copyright

We’re delighted to bring our readers a very pertinent guest post by a dear friend of the blog, Dr. Arul George Scaria, assistant professor at National Law University, Delhi – discussing a very basic issue that, if memory serves me right, has somehow escaped our attention on this blog! While we have earlier discussed whether “standards” can/should be copyrighted (see post here), the current post deals with the issue of the very text of our laws being copyrighted. We’d love

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Gilead Raises Privacy Concerns by Collecting Patient Data Regarding Sofosbuvir

/ By / Patent, Privacy

The Economic Times reports that Gilead Sciences is collecting details and keeping track of patients purchasing generic versions of its blockbuster Hepatitis-C medicine Sofosbuvir in an effort to prevent diversion of stocks to outside markets. In 2014, Gilead had voluntarily licensed the Hepatitis-C drug to seven Indian generic drug companies including Cipla, Ranbaxy, etc. According to the terms of the license, all these companies are allowed to set their own prices provided that royalties are paid to Gilead. The licensees

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Delhi High court grants interim injunction; restrains Glenmark from selling generic version of anti-diabetic drug Januvia (Sitagliptin)

/ By / Patent

On April 2013, Glenmark launched the generic version of Merck’s popular antidiabetic drug Januvia (Sitagliptin) and Janumet (combination of sitagliptin and Metformin). Subsequently Merck filed a suit against Glenmark seeking interim relief. The Delhi HC (Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw) denied interim relief to Merck. After denial of interim relief, Merck was also briefly engaged in mediation with Glenmark over the Januvia patent. Readers may recall that we had blogged about it here here and here. Aggrieved by the denial of

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You can’t have the ‘pi’ and eat it too!

/ By / Trademark

Belated ‘Pi Day’! (Which did not fall on a Friday!) This post deals with the lately baked trademark issue of ‘π’ versus ‘π.’ (pi day is celebrated on March 14 (3/14) The trademark at issue in this case was the symbol pi followed by a full stop: “π.” (U.S. trademark registration 4,473,631). This registration was issued to Paul Ingrisano, aka “Pi Productions Corp” (a Brooklyn based apparel artist). π. is used by Pi Productions Corp to brand T shirts etc. (here and

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