June 2016

Judging Judges (I): Whither Access to Law?

/ By / Others

And finally, I give vent to my long held lament against diarrhoeal decisions! Decisions that ramble on for reams on end, and come at the cost of both legal logic and jurisprudential depth. Decisions that are king size (paper wise), but dwarf like (merit wise). As we found in the case of a prominent IP judge from Delhi whose decisions are fairly long winded; but which (as the prolific Prashant Reddy demonstrated in this potent post here) are absolutely shoddy […]

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SpicyIP Weekly Review (5-11 June)

/ By / Others

Our Highlight of the Week for the last week is, quite definitely, Prashant Reddy’s excellent, detailed post reflecting on the Delhi High Court’s Justice Manmohan Singh’s major decisions and IP jurisprudence, and on the question of the criteria of appointments to the post of the Chairman of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board. His post comes in the context of reports that Justice Singh might be tapped for the post. Our first post this week was Prateek’s commentary on the recent

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Details of the International Patent Drafting Competition from the official website

International Patent Drafting Competition to be held by IIPRD

/ By / Event

SpicyIP is very happy to announce that the Institute of Intellectual Property Research and Development (IIPRD) is soon to conduct the International Patent Drafting Competition (IPDC) 2016! The IPDC has come to be after the success of the National Patent Drafting Competition (NPDC) 2015, which started as an initiative to spread awareness on patent issues whilst also seeking to enable practitioners to understand the essentials of patent drafting. The IPDC also hopes to promote the development of the skill of

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Judging Judges: Reviewing Justice Singh’s IP Jurisprudence

/ By / Copyright, Data Exclusivity, Others, Patent, Trademark

In this guest post, Prashant Reddy reflects on the major decisions by Justice Manmohan Singh of the Delhi High Court in the field of intellectual property law and on the larger question of criteria for appointment of persons to the position of Chairperson of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board. Warning: Very long post ahead. Title: A review of Justice Manmohan Singh’s judgments Author: Prashant Reddy As reported by Shamnad recently, the grapevine has it that Justice Manmohan Singh of the

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Plain Packaging: A Reality for India?

/ By / Trademark

There have been some interesting new developments in the already controversial plain packaging issue. Simply put, this controversy revolves around the proposal to introduce bland, colourless packaging for cigarettes and other tobacco products with just the name of the brand in plain text, accompanied by a large graphic health warning. This is done in order to make these products less attractive to young people. Read more about the plain packaging issue here and here. Plain Packaging PIL Recently, an Allahabad

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Government Withdraws Guidelines Fixing FRAND Terms on the Licensing of Bt Cotton

/ By / Innovation, Patent, Plant Variety Protection

As our readers would recall, the Ministry of Agriculture had issued a set of guidelines with far-reaching implications on May 18th, requiring patentees such as Monsanto to provide access to their GM technology to seed companies on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis. Prashant had analyzed the guidelines here. In case you were thinking that the face-off between the government/ Indian seed companies on the one hand and Monsanto on the other could not get any messier, you are

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SpicyIP Weekly Review ( 29th May – 4th June )

/ By / Others

SpicyIP Highlight of the Week Our SpicyIP Highlight of the Week was definitely the guest post by Harshavardhan Ganesan – an LLM student at the University of California, Berkeley – where he discusses the issue of trademark genericide. He begins by considering the reasons for a trademark’s foray into the public domain, and goes on to discuss the steps that companies can take to prevent the death of its trademarks. He concludes by throwing up several pertinent questions that the issue

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India’s New IP Policy: A “Bare” Act?

/ By / Innovation

I assumed the Hindu op-ed would be the last of my writings on that delightful document titled the “National IPR policy”; one that spewed out many a seductive IP slogan. Unfortunately, that was not to be: and I had to do a second take on this policy in the Deccan Herald. Likening the new policy to the Emperor’s new clothes, a famed fable of a vain king who struts around stark naked after being made to believe that he’d been woven

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Rectangles with rounded corners – Caltech, the newest entrant to Apple’s Patent War

/ By / Innovation, Patent

“It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners,” Samsung said in a statement following the 2012 verdict that went against them. Standing strong that the decision was not the last word on the matter, the much awaited appeal to the Supreme Court is to be heard in October this year. In a similar statement, Tim Cook applauded the decision for the loud and clear message that it sent:

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Hep C Drug Pricing: New Study finds Sofosbuvir globally unaffordable

/ By / Drug Regulation, Innovation, Patent

Imagine waking up on the wrong side of the bed. Your skin looks yellow and you start feeling blue. Abdominal pains make you cringe, despite never having binged. The family doctor rules out jaundice and draws a blank. Your hospital-next-door churns out the blood report and you anxiously gaze into the diagnosis: “Tested positive for Hepatitis C”. You become the latest addition to a pool of around 130 million people across the globe. Initially drained of every modicum of hope,

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