How many of you have heard of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002? I had heard about the Act long ago but somehow never got down to actually trying to understand it and when I did get down to it while researching for this post I was quite stunned with both, the importance of this Act and the seemingly muted discussions of such an important piece of legislation in the mainstream press. Unlike The Patent Act which is considered the ‘sexier’…
Once upon a time many years ago an evil prince tried to pirate our ‘queen of rices’ – ‘basmati rice’ – but luckily our ever vigilant government challenged the pirates in an adversarial duel (3 years late!) and won back our ‘basmati’ swearing to protect this ‘queen of rices’ from the bio-‘Pirates of America’. ‘Basmati’ – Patents and trademarksI know the above introduction sounds much too over-dramatized, over-romanticized for an IP blog but those sentences are quite accurate of the…
karnataka scores once again in registration of a ‘geographical indication’ Of late Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in India have been getting their fair share of bad publicity. Amongst others, the Novartis dispute, as also the yoga patenting dispute were especially damaging to the image of ‘intellectual property’ in the Indian psyche. But as the Prime Minister Dr. Singh (or was it Yeats?) famously said ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ So true for the world of Indian IP…
SPOTTING THE THIN RED LINE BETWEEN CULTURAL BORROWING & COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT I am not quite sure as to how Bollywood got its name; my favourite theory is that after decades of copying/borrowing Hollywood storylines, scripts, screenplays the Bollywood industry, in a bid to acknowledge their Western gurus as their sources of inspiration, sought to name themselves after their gurus. Indeed a fitting guru-dakshina! For those uninitiated to the world of Bollywood – it’s a term used to describe the popular…
The last couple of months have been quite exciting for SpicyIP. From patent disputes (Novartis & Bajaj – TVS) to copyright disputes (Sholay) to trademark disputes (Sholay again) we’ve experienced the ‘holy trinity’ of intellectual property laws. This however seems to be only the beginning of an IP conscious India. The latest high profile dispute to go to court is the Britannia – Danone Dispute over Britannia’s trademark ‘Tiger’; probably one of the first disputes where the tables have been…