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.

Supreme Court on Copyrightability of Judgments: Guest Post

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Pursuant to our earlier post on a Supreme Court case (EBC vs DB Modak) dealing with the copyrightability of court decisions/judgments, we bring to you a guest post by Yashaswani Kumar. A 4th year student at NALSAR, she has written an incisive analysis of the Supreme Court ruling. A Modicum of Flavour “The decision in the case of Eastern Book Company v. D.B. Modak sees the Supreme Court taking tentative steps in altering the jurisprudence surrounding the concept of originality […]

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Are Indian Court Judgments Copyrightable?

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In a very interesting copyright case, the Supreme Court of India recently ruled that there can be no copyright in the raw text of court judgments/decisions. Well, we don’t exactly need a court to tell us this, as section 52 (1) (q) of the Copyright Act makes this crystal clear. The real issue before the court was: how much of work ought one to do to on such “raw” judgments to make them copyrightable? Will mere copy-editing (the mere correction

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USPTO Rejects Gilead’s Patents Covering Key HIV Drugs

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In March 2007, PUBPAT (Public Patent Foundation) filed formal requests with the United States Patent and Trademark Office challenging four key HIV/AIDS drug patents held by Gilead Sciences, Inc. These patents relate to tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF). Gilead markets TDF in the United States under the brand name VIREAD (and also as a part of its ATRIPLA combination product). As part of its requests, PUBPAT submitted prior art that the Patent Office did not review before granting the patents to

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Roche vs CIPLA: Businessworld Article

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Gauri Kamath of Businessworld writes a fascinating article on the CIPLA infringement strategy. See her report here, which I’ve copied below: Launch First, Fight Later “The Delhi high court is currently hearing a high-profile patents lawsuit that has the potential to change the rules of the game in India. In a first, Mumbai-based drug maker Cipla has launched a copycat or generic version of a drug with the full knowledge that the original has been patented in India. The product

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Roche vs CIPLA: The Law on Temporary Injunctions

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Feroz Ali, who runs pharmapatents wrote to let us know of an error in one of the cases we’d cited in our earlier posts on the captioned theme. We stated that one of the cases that denied a temporary injunction in a patent case (since the patent was relatively new and there was an invalidity attack) is “Periathambi v. Special Tahsildar, AIR 1965 Madras 327”. Unfortunately we got the citation right, but the case name wrong! The name of the

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Roche vs CIPLA: Some Dates

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Dr Gopakumar Nair, an expert on patent issues and founder of the reputed Patent Gurukul site has sent us some great details on the dates re: the patent applications in the Tarceva case. The dates are very critical to issues such as novelty, time for filing post grant opposition etc. He writes as below: “Indian Patent Application No. 537/DEL/1996 A filed on 13th March, 1996 has been granted as 196774 and published on 13th July, 2007 in the Official Journal

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Roche vs CIPLA: Pricing Issues

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Readers will recollect our earlier posts on the “pricing” issue in this patent litigation and our plea to disentangle “pricing” from “patentability”. A conflation in this regard will only lead to convoluted patent jurisprudence in this country. Does anyone know what the actual pricing is in the Tarceva case? News reports such as the Hindu and the Mint state the price of Roche’s drug is Rs 4800 per tablet, while CIPLA sells at Rs 1600. I’ve heard however that Abhishek

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Roche vs CIPLA: Update: The Law on Temporary Injunctions

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CIPLA’s counsel, Arun Jaitley concluded his arguments on the 24th of Jan. The matter will now come up on the 31st of Jan. And all eyes will be on Abhishek Singhvi (counsel for Roche) who will be doing the rejoinder on the 31st and stated in court that he would counter each one of CIPLA’s arguments on invalidity. Singhvi was great on the first day and then withered away after Jaitley came on the scene. We’ll have to see if

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Roche vs CIPLA: The "Pricing" Paradox

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An earlier post noted that CIPLA objected to the high pricing by Roche of it’s cancer drug, Tarceva (Erlotinib) and was therefore resorting to the drastic step of infringing its patent. Paradoxically, CIPLA has just been issued a notice by the NPPA (National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority) for allegedly over-pricing its antibiotic, Ciprofloxacin!! Recall our earlier post in this regard titled “CIPLA Milking Indian Consumers: Charity Does Not Begin at Home”. CH Unnikrishnan of the Mint Reports: CIPLA Gets Fresh Notice

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SpicyIP Email Updates and Subscription

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A number of you have subscribed for email updates from SpicyIP. For those who have not, please visit the blog by clicking here and then scroll down the blog till you come to a button “Subcribe to SpicyIP” (this is on the left hand side of the blog). Enter your email ID in the box and voila–you are subscribed and will receive regular email updates of the SpicyIP posts. A far better way than having to log on to the

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