Author name: Shamnad Basheer

Prof. (Dr.) Shamnad Basheer founded SpicyIP in 2005. He's also the Founder of IDIA, a project to train underprivileged students for admissions to the leading law schools. He served for two years as an expert on the IP global advisory council (GAC) of the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2015, he received the Infosys Prize in Humanities in 2015 for his work on legal education and on democratising the discourse around intellectual property law and policy. The jury was headed by Nobel laureate, Prof. Amartya Sen. Professional History: After graduating from the NLS, Bangalore Prof. Basheer joined Anand and Anand, one of India’s leading IP firms. He went on to head their telecommunication and technology practice and was rated by the IFLR as a leading technology lawyer. He left for the University of Oxford to pursue post-graduate studies, completing the BCL, MPhil and DPhil as a Wellcome Trust scholar. His first academic appointment was at the George Washington University Law School, where he served as the Frank H Marks Visiting Associate Professor of IP Law. He then relocated to India in 2008 to take up the MHRD Chaired Professorship in IP Law at WB NUJS, a leading Indian law school. Later, he was the Honorary Research Chair of IP Law at Nirma University and also a visiting professor of law at the National Law School (NLS), Bangalore. Prof. Basheer has published widely and his articles have won awards, including those instituted by ATRIP, the Stanford Technology Law Review and CREATe. He was consulted widely by the government, industry, international organisations and civil society on a variety of IP issues. He also served on several government committees.

Silencing the Song

/ By / Copyright

A series of decisions emasculating the rights of some of our finest creators (music composers and lyricists) have confounded many of us. First it was the Kerala High Court. Then the Mumbai High Court. And the latest in this blunderful series is a Delhi high court decision that falls prey to the same jurisprudential folly that assumes that when a song is broadcast, there is no violation of the underlying rights of music composers and lyricists. We’ve requested our popular […]

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Whither the Song of Justice?

/ By / Copyright

It all began with a 1977 Supreme Court decision, where a judge, for reasons best known to him, interpreted the law relating to Bollywood music in a manner that effectively emasculated the rights of music composers and lyricists. His brother judge, known otherwise for standing up for the under-dog in language often reminiscent of “poetic” justice, remained largely silent (by his “verbose” standards). Fast forward a couple of decades and we have two collecting societies (IPRS and PPL) that enter

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Patent Discrimination Against Indigenous Communities?

/ By / Biological Diversity, Patent

The Times of India recently reported that the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) is in the process of documenting traditional medicinal knowledge belonging to indigenous communities (tribals) from the Andamans and is even planning on helping them patent it. By way of background, the ICMR is the apex agency responsible for the promotion of biomedical research in India. The TOI piece notes in pertinent part: “ICMR’s Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC) is preparing a unique Community Biodiversity Register (CBDR)

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Transiting through Legal Uncertainty?

/ By / Patent

The generic drug transit seizure issue, where drugs shipped from India to Brazil via European ports were seized by customs authorities on grounds IP violation, has occupied the collective imagination of those interested in IP and trade for more than two years now. The ever vigilant press has, in the past, reported a settlement between the EU and India (and Brazil) more than once. The last I counted, there were at least 33 such reports of such a settlement. And

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Forum Blasting at the IPO: Kurian’s Parting Blast?

/ By / Patent

Indian IP is complex, fun and certainly spicy. But most importantly, it is unique. And one of the factors that makes for this uniqueness is that we have four IP offices across the country (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai). Given that all offices have equal powers in many respects, it is downright derogatory to label any of them as “branches”. One might argue however, a la George Orwell, that some offices are more “equal” than others, since they house the

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IP Research Fellow Position at NUJS

/ By / Uncategorized

Another position has opened up for an IP Research Fellow at NUJS, one of the leading law schools in India. The Research Fellow will be expected to work at the cutting edge of IP policy and research work, IP litigation and IP education. We have a number of exciting IP events planned for the future, including IP workshops/seminars/moot courts and the Fellow is expected to actively participate in all of these. Apart from this, the Fellow will be involved in

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Roger Bates, Pharma Patents and Contempt of Court?

/ By / Patent

A recent piece in the DNA by Roger Bates and Suresh Sati advocates for stronger IP protection in India and the signing upto TRIPS plus provisions in the India EU FTA, using interlia the tantalising prospect of significant FDI flows that would resuscitate India from its abysmal poverty statistic. I was particularly struck by one of the statements in this piece, where the authors note: “India’s patent office and courts have seemingly bowed to pressure from powerful domestic producers to

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Patent Agent Viva: Sense, Sensibility and Constitutionality

/ By / Patent

I’ve received emails from several candidates who took the patent agent exam earlier on this year, decrying interalia the viva (oral exam) process, its inherent biases and the lack of competent questioning by some examiners. We did a few earlier posts elaborating on why the viva process is inherently flawed and why it has no reasonable co-relation to the conceptual soundness or otherwise of a proposed patent agent. When you’ve already addressed complicated patent queries in a written exam and

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FTA’s and TRIPS Flexibilities: An Oxymoronic Safeguard?

/ By / Uncategorized

The concept of TRIPS flexibilities is one that has been regurgitated time and again in the literature on IP and development. The most profound pronunciation of this concept can be traced back to the late Murasoli Maran, who, during his time as India’s Commerce Minister quipped: “We are all aware that the text of the TRIPS is a masterpiece of ambiguity, couched in the language of diplomatic compromise, resulting in a verbal tight-rope walk, with a prose remarkably elastic and

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Condolence: Demise of the longest serving Controller

/ By / Uncategorized

This comes very late in the day, but is a condolence message that had to be written. Last year, we lost one of India’s leading IP figures, Shri Rajendra A Acharya, who passed away at his residence in Pune on the 18th of July 2010. Acharya-ji has the distinction of serving as India’s Controller General of Patents for a good 12 years (a term that traversed the ’80’s and the early 90’s). My guess is that this makes him the

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