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.

Are Indian Software Firms Innovative?

/ By / Innovation

SpicyIP has, in the past, lamented about the dearth of innovative products from Indian software firms. And our previous posts queried as to why Indian IT majors never really made the transition from “services” to “products”. In an excellent article, one of my favourite economists, Ashish Arora argues: “…many of the leading Indian firms have tried to develop products, with limited success. The lack of success ought not to surprise anyone. Penny pinching and risk averse management habits ingrained while […]

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Guest Post: Bajaj vs TVS Patent Dispute

/ By / Uncategorized

SpicyIP has been reporting on the Bajaj-TVS feud. See here for previous posts. We now have a guest post from Sai Deepak, a very enterprising student from the Rajiv Gandhi School of IP Law, IIT Kharagpur: SPARKS FLY AS TITANS CROSS PLUGS “This post will attempt a more detailed look at the issues involved. There are two issues here: i) Whether TVS infringes Bajaj’s patent?ii) Whether Bajaj’s patent is valid in the first place? As regards the first issue, one

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Larry Lessig on Anti-Corruption: Lessons For India

/ By / Uncategorized

Some of you may already know that the cyberlaw guru Larry Lessig (of the creative commons fame) decided his shift his focus from cyberlaw/copyright to anti-corruption. I suspect this decision came as a result of the Supreme Court decision that copyright extension for Mickey Mouse was perfectly constitutional–despite Larry’s all out war against the extension and his powerful arguments in court that this was unconstitutional and bad policy. I am not entirely sure if the “constitutionality” question is an easy

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Spicy News: UK Trademark Office Invalidates "MASALA"

/ By / Trademark

Ilanah Simon, who teaches at UCL, London and is one of the bloggers at the internationally renowned IPKat blog brings us this extremely spicy news: ” The word mark MASALA was invalidated by Mr Hearing Officer Foley. He found that the sign, a constituent verbal component of various Indian spice mixtures, was both descriptive and customary in the trade for“cooked vegetables” in the Class 29 specification, “preparations made from cereals” in the Class 30 specification, and “foodstuffs comprising or made

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SpicyIP Posts and Subscribers: Some Interesting Statistics

/ By / Uncategorized

I just found out that we’ve completed about 350 posts now–since the first post in October 2005, when the sprawling corn fields of Illinois, Champaign forced me to keep boredom at bay by taking to blogging… Incidentally, we’ve also acquired an email subscription base of about 350 subscribers—perhaps one extra subscriber for each post that we put out!! If you know of any friends/colleagues interested in subscribing, please refer them to this post, which explains how to subscribe. It also

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Roche vs CIPLA: The Final Day…

/ By / Uncategorized

Apologies for the delay in bringing you the latest on this dispute (the court hearing on the 31st of Jan), as I’d been travelling. But thanks to Taapsi Johri and Jay Thareja for sharing their excellent notes with me–it almost felt like I was sitting in court and watching Singhvi take a shot at rebutting Jaitley’s arguments. As many of you may have heard, the court reserved judgment and it is likely that we will see a ruling on this

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EU to Take Taiwan to WTO over Compulsory Licensing Provision

/ By / Uncategorized

If the EU does file a complaint at the WTO against Taiwan’s CL provision, we are likely to gain more insight into the contours of the compulsory licensing provisions and the various flexibilities inherent in it. Of course, recordable storage media is very different from drugs and we’re likely to see less politicization of the dispute here. Also, EU’s main problem seems to be the alleged sales of CD’s outside Taiwan–which, if true, is clearly prohibited under WTO rules. Interestingly,

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Doha Style Compulsory Licenses for Exports: The Politics….

/ By / Patent

Readers will recollect our earlier posts on the Doha Style compulsory licensing issue. We reported on Natco’s application to use the Doha provision (implemented into Indian law via section 92A) to export Tarceva to Nepal. The 2003 Decision implementing the Doha Declaration (which made such licenses for export to countries with no manufacturing capabilities a possibility under WTO law) was a temporary measure. Developing countries moved to make this a permanent amendment i.e. Article 31bis. However, if Article 31 bis

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India and TRIPS Compliance: Protectionist Policies

/ By / Patent

Subsequent to my post on India and TRIPS compliance issues, I received a very interesting email from one of my dear friends in the US. I reproduce the email and its response below. Would be great to hear what our readers think of India and TRIPS compliance issues. The Email: “Do you feel like you have to defend India’s interpretation of TRIPS against outside attack? I felt that some of your responses sounded a little defensive in the end. For

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Roche vs CIPLA: The Contours of Section 3(d)

/ By / Uncategorized

The Roche vs CIPLA litigation gives us an excellent opportunity to examine the contours of section 3(d). Please read our previous posts, please see here. Section 3(d) reads as below: “the mere discovery of a new form of a known substance which does not result in increased efficacy of that substance or the mere discovery of any new property or new use for a known substance or of the mere use of a known process, machine or apparatus unless such

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