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.

Roche vs CIPLA: UK Rejects Tarceva as Too Expensive!!

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Jason Douglas of Dow Jones reports that: ” The U.K’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence said Thursday that Roche Holding AG’s (RHHBY) drug Tarceva has been turned down as a treatment for non-small cell lung cancer because it’s too expensive. NICE said Tarceva could not be considered a cost-effective use of the U.K.’s state-run National Health Service’s resources compared to Sanofi-Aventis’s (SNY) Taxotere. NICE, which determines whether drugs should be available on the NHS in England and Wales […]

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NKC Vice Chairman: Bayh Dole Bill was Shrouded in Secrecy

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TV Padma of the Science and Development Network (Sci Dev) has this report on the proposed Indian Bayh Dole bill. As per her report, the bill was first recommended by the National Knowledge Commission (NKC). Pushpa Bhargava (who resigned as Vice Chairman from the NKC last year) is quoted as alleging that there was considerable secrecy around the bill and that “every attempt was made to circumvent an open discussion and debate over it..” Given that Pushpa Bhargava had an

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SpicyIP Tidbits: Mint Story on Patent Loophole in India

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CH Unni writes a front page story in the Mint on section 107A(b) and the possibility that this ambiguous provision could be strategically exploited by Indian generic companies to import drugs from Bangladesh to India. Readers will recollect that SpicyIP ran a couple of posts on this topic. See here and here. In fact, this post here generated the most number of comments (about 25 comments so far) that the blog has seen so far!! For those interested in the

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World IP Day: From "Faith" Based IP to "Fact" Based IP

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As many of our readers know, today is the World Intellectual Property Day, a day that was first marked 8 years ago by WIPO as an occasion to commemorate and celebrate “not only the enormous power of human creativity, but also the intellectual property rights that help to fuel and channel it, making it such an important driving force for economic, cultural and social development.” SpicyIP wishes to celebrate this special day with all its readers, who have done so

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Indian Intellectual Property: The Transitition from Saraswati to Lakshmi

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Peter Ollier, Asia Editor of MIP (Managing Intellectual Property) has a brilliant story in the latest issue of the MIP on the Indian IP regime. For those of you familiar with the MIP, you will recollect that Peter has been one of the most sophisticated and well informed writers on the Indian IP scene. To access the article, click here. If you are a first time user, you can register for a free subscription and access the full version of

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Gauri Kamath’s Coverage of the Proposed Bayh Dole Bill

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In an exceptionally well written and researched piece on the proposed Bayh Dole style bill in India, Gauri Kamath of Businessworld asks: “Is Greater Patenting of Research Funded by Taxpayers Beneficial?�”As readers may be aware, SpicyIP has been pushing for more transparency around this bill. We are extremely happy to note that journalists such as Gauri are making an effort to understand the various nuances and complex issues around this proposed bill. And their incisive analysis and coverage will go

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Parallel Imports: Bangladesh as a New Business Opportunity for Indian Generics?

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In a very incisive post, Mrinalini spoke about the scope of Section 107A of the Indian Patents Act, a provision dealing with the tricky issue of “parallel imports”. Does this provision present yet another business opportunity for our home grown generic companies? How does this implicate the mandate to grant the patentee an “exclusive right to import” under TRIPS? I had discussed some of these issues with Joe C Mathew of the Business Standard some weeks back. Owing to a

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Roche vs CIPLA: The Rhetoric of Patent Busting

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The Indian Express carried a short note of mine on the Roche vs CIPLA decision by Justice Ravinder S Bhat. I’ve reproduced the text below. For our previous posts on this issue, see here.Unless Roche is able to demonstrate empirically that CIPLA’s lower prices for Erlotinib (the lung cancer drug in issue) does not really translate to increased access to poor patients, it is difficult to see how Justice Bhat’s order will be overturned in appeal. “The rhetoric of ‘patent

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Roche and Compulsory Licensing: What’s Sauce for the Goose is Sauce for the Gander

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We had blogged on the compulsory licensing (CL) implications of the recent Roche vs CIPLA judgment here and here. While Roche may fret and fume about the judgment and how it effectively grants “compulsory licenses” to infringers such as CIPLA, it may well turn out to be the beneficiary of a compulsory license in the US! Readers will recollect our earlier post on the US position on temporary injunctions. We reproduce bits of that as background for those not familiar

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Roche vs CIPLA: "Public Interest" Imported into Indian Jurisprudence

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Readers may recollect an earlier post on the recent Roche vs CIPLA decision, where we point to the fact that the Delhi High Court order refusing to injunct CIPLA effectively paves the way for “judicially created” compulsory licensing norms in India. So how does Indian law on this point compare with the US? The key distinction appears to be that while US courts explicitly factor in “public interest” whilst deciding whether to grant an injunction (restraining order) or not, Indian

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