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.

Pharmexcil Conference on Pharma Patent Litigation and Trade Barriers

/ By / Patent

Pharmexcil (Pharmaceuticals Export Promotion Council) is organising what promises to be an interesting one day conference on “Patent Litigation and Trade Barriers for Indian Generic Companies” this Friday (21st) in Mumbai. This program has been put together by Dr Gopakumar Nair, Founder of Patent Gurukul on behalf of Pharmexcil. Details of the conference below: Chief Guest Shri Arun Jha, IAS, Jt. Secretary, Dept. of Pharmaceuticals, Govt. of India. Date & Venue On Friday, 21st August 2009 At Sunville Banquet & […]

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Breaking News: Patent Linkage Killed by Delhi High Court and Bayer Fined

/ By / Drug Regulation

In a judgment handed down today by Justice Ravindra Bhat, the Delhi High Court dismissed a writ petition filed by Bayer seeking to institute a drug patent linkage mechanism through the backdoor. Essentially, Bayer’s writ petition asked the court to direct the Drug Controller to desist granting drug regulatory approval to Cipla’s generic version of Nexavar, as this would allegedly violate the patent rights of Bayer. The Delhi High Court indicated its strong disapproval of Bayer’s intention to use the

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Strategically Challenging Transit Drug Seizures at the WTO: EC vs Netherlands?

/ By / Patent

Pursuant to our post highlighting a UK decision involving Nokia and its impact on the current controversy involving the seizure of transit drugs from India, Joe Mathew of the Business Standard ran an interesting piece highlighting this issue. Provocatively titled “India Warned on Moving WTO over Drug Seizures”, Joe states as below: “Even as India considers the European Union (EU) directive that allows seizure of goods-in-transit by its member countries as violative of the World Trade Organization’s TRIPS (trade-related aspects

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Dr Vivekanandan appointed as New Dean at IIT Kharagpur Law School

/ By / Uncategorized

Dr VC Vivekandandan, a leading IP academic from India was recently appointed as the Dean of the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law (RGSOIPL), IIT Kharagpur. RGSOIPL was established in the year 2006 by IIT Kharapur in collaboration with the George Washington University Law School, Washington DC. RGSOIPL is the brainchild of Mr. Vinod Gupta, CEO of InfoUSA and Life Fellow of IIT Kharagpur, who proposed its setting up and also promised a substantial grant to that end.

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NUJS IP Talk: Watal on TRIPS and Doha

/ By / Uncategorized

A reminder that we have Jayashree Watal speaking on “TRIPS and the Future of Doha” at NUJS on Wednesday (12th August) at 3 pm in the NUJS auditorium. As noted in the earlier post, Ms Watal intends to cover the current Doha negotiations, TRIPS and Development, IP and Public Health Issues, and issues of special interest to India such as geographical indications and protection of biodiversity. For those of you in and around Kolkata, I hope you can make it.

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Ramkumar vs Cell Importers: India’s Biggest IP Case Yet?

/ By / Patent

The Madras High Court recently dismissed a writ petition filed by Ramkumar against the orders of the Customs Commissioners (in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi). As noted in previous posts, these detailed orders by the commissioners held in favour of the cell phone importers (such as Samsung, Hansum and Spice Mobile), noting that Ramkumar’s patent did not cover “dual SIM” phones in their entirety, but only those dual SIM phones that permitted simultaneous communication as well. Ramkumar proceeded to challenge these

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Rigging Data: IPR’s and the IMPACT of Counterfeits

/ By / Patent

There’s no dearth of counterfeiting and piracy data. And the figures escalate year after year. Naturally these figures are followed up with clarion calls to have more aggressive IPR enforcement. And often times, these heavy duty figures (which span a variety of IP industries such as pharmaceuticals, software, music and movies) are followed up by figures on loss of jobs, employment etc as a consequence of piracy and counterfeiting. And more recently, these figures have also been linked up to

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The Fate of the Rosiglitazone Patents: Far From Rosy?

/ By / Patent

Recently, a colleague of mine asserted that till date, GSK had obtained only one pharmaceutical product patent in India! Given that GSK has the largest sales in India (of all the MNC’s operating within India) and have introduced most of their global products in India as well, this figure seems a tad too difficult to believe. Anyone in the know from amongst our readers? And with this puzzling statistic, which if true, could raise some very interesting questions about the

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First VIP Speaker at NUJS: Jayashree Watal on Doha and TRIPS

/ By / Biological Diversity

As mentioned in an earlier post, we’re now running the VIP (Venting Ideas on Intellectual Property) series for this academic year at NUJS. Our first speaker for this academic year is Jayashree Watal who will speak on “TRIPS and the Current Doha Round”. In her talk, she proposes to touch upon the current Doha negotiations, TRIPS and Development, IP and Public Health Issues, and issues of special interest to India such as geographical indications and protection of biodiversity. For those

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Compulsory Licensing by the Copyright Board: Whither Copyright Expertise?

/ By / Copyright

SpicyIP just discovered that the mother of all compulsory licensing battles is being waged before the Indian Copyright Board, a statutory body entrusted with certain specific tasks under the Indian Copyright Act. The warring factions involve radio stations (such as Radio City and Radio Mirchi) on the one hand who are seeking to gain compulsory licenses to broadcast music at low rates, and content owners (T Series) or administrators (PPL, IPRS) who wish to peg the rates as high as

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