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.

IP Opening: IP Chair Research Fellow at NUJS

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A 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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Celebrating World IP Day: A Murderous Design!

/ By / Copyright

Here’s wishing all our readers a wonderful World IP Day! As many of you know, WIPO is focussing on “designs” as the key theme for this years’ IP day. And this offers me a perfect opportunity to throw up an idea I’ve been harbouring for a while now, namely that we drive a deep stake into the heart of the design regime and bury it once and for all! Of course, the actual proposal is not as dramatic as the

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15 Years of TRIPS: Rethinking IP and Development

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The Centre for WTO Studies (CWS) has been at the forefront of driving national IP and trade policy in India. The reins of this institution passed on recently from noted scholar Biswajit Dhar to Abhiijt Das, a thought leader who drove some very important policy initiatives in his past avatar as UNCTAD’s head in India; most notably, for those of us in the IP community, he was instrumental in shifting the focus away from merely registering GI’s to helping translate

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Hazare Hunger and Policy Making

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The Hazare anti corruption hunger strike captured the imagination of the nation for the last few weeks. As many of you know, corruption is an issue that is of immense interest to SpicyIP, which has attempted to cure this evil plague in the IP space through the deployment of one principle, namely that of transparency. Needless to state, corruption is a complex multifactorial issue and we need to hit it from several angles, the law being just one of them.

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Demise of Leading IP Attorney

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We bring you sad tidings of the demise of Mr K Mugunthan, a very reputed IP attorney from down South. Mr Mugunthan passed away on the 4th April 2011 and is survived by his wife and 3 year old son. He had more than two decades of experience before the Madras High Court and was instrumental in notching several wins, some of which we include below (as per a list given by his colleagues from the law firm of AA

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Drug Firms and Patent "Working": Extent of Compliance with Form 27

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As promised in a previous post, we now bring you the full report of our RTI investigation into Form 27 (patent working) compliance issue. This report details out our rather tortuous tryst with the patent office in terms of getting this information…it took us more than 6 months to get this information! One of the key reasons we spent so much time on this is to showcase the difficulty of getting this information, and to therefore plead with the Controller

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The ‘Non Working" Of Patent Working Norms

/ By / Patent

The Times of India, Mint and Economic Times reported today on an RTI investigation by SpicyIP in relation to the “working” of drug patents in India. Rupali Mukherjee of the Times of India writes: “Five pharma MNCs, including Pfizer, Bayer, Roche, Schering and Bristol Myers Squibb, have been accused of violating patent laws with regard to top-selling patented anti-cancer and hepatitis drugs sold in the country. A RTI application filed before the Patent Office reveals that since the medicines are

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LII in India: Kolkata Launch of Open Access Portal

/ By / Others

The Legal Information Institute (LII), an organisation at the forefront of driving open access in all things related to law, launches in India in a big way. The Legal Information Institute of India (LII of India) was inaugurated by Dr M. Veerappa Moily, Union Minister of Law and Justice, in New Delhi on 9 March. LII India has been accepted as the 34th member of the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM). It is currently a consortium of 8 partner

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Breaking News: Justice Sridevan Appointed as IPAB Chairman

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A writ petition was recently filed by the Asian Patent Attorneys Association (APAA) asking that the court direct the government to immediately appoint judicial and other members to the IPAB…a problematic tribunal that has been non functional for the most part in the recent past. When the matter came up before Justice Muralidhar yesterday, Addnl Solicitor General (ASG), AS Chandiok stated in open court that the government had just appointed Justice Prabha Sridevan to the post of Chairman, IPAB. Justice

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Supreme Court Lifts Stay in Radio Compulsory Licensing Dispute

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We had blogged earlier on the stay issued by the Supreme Court in the long and tortuous radio station compulsory licensing dispute that has been languishing in courts and tribunals for more than a decade now. We reported then that the SC had effectively ordered a stay on the operation of the copyright board order that stipulated that radio stations could play music (over which PPL had collecting rights) by paying a 2% royalty on their advertising revenues. Today, the

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