Highlight of the Fortnight
We’ve had some interesting posts over the last couple of weeks, but none of them were met with the response that greeted Spadika’s piece breaking down the debacle that was this year’s CLAT. She starts off by summarising the allegations – that a large bunch of questions were lifted from sources such as GKToday and the CAT. Then, she attacks the impressive array of issues thrown up if these allegations were to be true. She ponders the copyrightability of multiple choice questions in different scenarios and goes on to conclude that although there are some instances in which the lifting of questions would not constitute infringement, it’s highly unlikely that the CLAT Committee is going to get away with this. She also fishes out a few fascinating nuggets, such as the fact that the CLAT Committee and the CAT are both instruments of the state (making a confrontation between them highly interesting). She also notes the hypocrisy of the entire thing – NLUs have been bastions of privilege for as long as they’ve existed, and the CLAT seems to be perpetuating this by not only lifting questions from difficult-to-access sources, but by then going on to lock these up behind its own paywall – students have to pay to download previous years’ papers.
Kiran then chronicled the dispute over the ZARA trademark, with the international fashion major clashing with a homegrown restaurant chain. She highlights how the judges have rightly thrown out the defendant’s claims on almost every major point of clash, and concludes by noting that the plaintiff seems to have rightly earned an interim injunction against the defendants.
She then followed up with a post wondering about the origins of the Make In India logo, and asking whether there was anything fishy about the curious similarity it bears with a design used by a Zurich-based bank for an ad campaign on Swiss trains. She also reports the admittedly shaky response from the DIPP on the logo and its “inspirations”.
Madhulika posted on the Patent Office website outage, emphasizing that the website was a critical tool for agents, lawyers and inventors, and that the Patent Office needed to justify the lack of adequate notice given to the public, especially considering that this was a planned outage for application and data migration.
Kartik then wrote about the pervasion of IP’s influence in transactions involving physical goods, with sale agreements for automobiles finding themselves replaced by what seems to be an elaborate license agreement in which the software powering the car becomes the primary good, rather than the physical car itself. This would make DRM-style “lock-ins” much more effective, since the law would now take an active interest every time a hobbyist decided to hack a gadget (or an automobile) that he purchased licensed. He also ponders the law’s treatment of transactions involving IP bundled along with physical goods in India.
Swaraj did a post on I-MAK and other organisations launching a concerted global campaign challenging Gilead’s Sovaldi patents. He narrates the history of the drug in India, and emphasizes its importance in developing countries, since they hold a significant percentage of the world’s Hepatitis C patients.
Swaraj also summarised two articles on innovation policy for the blog’s readers, taking on questions such as the distinction between innovation and progress and the dogma surrounding these terms. He then asks readers to take a good hard look at the state of scientific research in the country, and the level of support that scientists receive from the bureaucracy. He ends by posing a series of questions on the relationship between promoting the “national interest” in innovation and things like environmental degradation.
Finally, I did a post covering the Thejesh GN saga, with the Bangalore-based activist receiving a cease-and-desist for attempting to expose script injection by ISPs by uploading screenshots of the code embedded in his website. I attempted to set up some counter-arguments that someone in Thejesh’s position could utilise, and wondered whether the tampering of website source code (through script injection) could constitute the creation of an unauthorised derivative work.
SpicyIP Tidbits
- Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance launches a new website
- When Nani Palkhivala was accused of plagiarism
- India’s first IP YouTube channel
- Yale Clinical Fellowship on Global Health Justice
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