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.

New Antimalarial Pill: Encouraging R&D for Neglected Diseases

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The International Herald Tribune carries this interesting story of a PPP (Public Private Partnership) between Sanofi Aventis and DNdI (Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative) that resulted in a new and useful malaria pill. The news item states: “A new, cheap pill to treat malaria was introduced Thursday, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity. The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed […]

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TOWARDS A CONSTRUCTIVE ENGAGEMENT WITH THE MASHELKAR REPORT CONTROVERSY: PART II

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I’ve deliberately changed the title of this “series” to enable a more constructive engagement with the debates around this theme. I’ve received a number of emails that continue to query me on why I argue that section 3(d) is incompatible with TRIPS and why my report stated so. I do no such thing. Let me use this post to briefly dispose of this issue. I’ve argued in an earlier post that section 3(d), according to my reading, is perfectly compatible

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DECONSTRUCTING THE MASHELKAR COMMITTEE REPORT CONTROVERSY :PART 1

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Coming as I do from the relatively apolitical world of research and academia, the events of the last two weeks have taken me by surprise and left me wondering as to how easy it is for the substantive issues in any debate to get sidelined. I thought I’d reflect on the “real” issues surrounding this controversy once the “name” calling and personal/ad hominem attacks had died down. But it only seems to be getting worse. Friends keep asking me as

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The Mashelkar Committee Report on Patents: Placing it in context OR Reading the lines and not “between” them

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Having just completed a hectic 4 day IP conference co-organised by the George Washington University and the CII, the last thing on my mind was “intellectual property”. I just wasn’t going to sit and brood about the very topic that had “exhausted” me in those 4 days (“exhaustion” in the context of intellectual property rights is a joke that only IP aficionados will get). Fortunately or unfortunately, my flight out of Goa, where we incidentally had the last day of

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INCENTIVISING DRUGS IN INDIA: YET ANOTHER IP LEGISLATION

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It appears that the government is looking at more ways to incentivise drug discovery and to encourage patenting in this regard. A news item (http://www.indiaenews.com/business/20061125/30030.htm) states: “India will soon have a law to provide incentives to scientists and public enterprises in the biotechnology sector for creating patents, Minister of Science and Technology Kapil Sibal said Saturday. ‘We are bringing in a legislation in the budget session of parliament that will enable scientists to receive one-third of the value of the

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BUSINESS METHOD PATENTS AND PATENT ELIGIBILITY

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Business Method patents and the whole issue of “patent eligibility” raises its controversial head yet again, with the UK courts recently endorsing a patent office refusal to grant Australian entrepreneur and solicitor Neal Macrossan a patent for “an automated method of acquiring the documents necessary to incorporate a company. It involves a user sitting at a computer and communicating with a remote server, answering questions”. The court summarised the invention thus: “The essence of the invention is that by means

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PLANT VARIETY REGISTRY SET UP IN INDIA

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The Financial Times Reports that “A National Plant Variety Registry has been set up by the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Authority (PPV&FR) under the Union ministry of agriculture to register crop varieties.” Folks following this debate may be aware of the fact that although this legislation was enacted in 2001, it came into force only in 2005. It seems routine now for Indian IP legislations to have more than a 3 year gap between the date of

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AVOIDING RESPONSIBILITY: COURT ROOMS VS THE STARS?

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In my capacity as a visiting associate professor at GWU law school, I took a bunch of students to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to see the court in action. Unfortunately, although this is a specialized IP court, we saw only one patent case that morning–the rest were cases concerning procedural matter such as the statute of limitations (in a vaccine injury case). Unfortunately, this IP specialised court has also to contend with these sort of

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PATENTS AND BIO-RESOURCES

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The debate on the link between patents and bio-resources/TK continues to rage. The latest is an AIPPI report which is skeptical of any move to link up concerns of bio-resource protection/TK expropriation with patent regimes. An MIP news item states: “The patent system should not be used for controlling whether IP owners follow rules on using genetic resources and traditional knowledge laid down in the Convention on Biological Diversity, according to members of the International Association for the Protection of

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THE DEVELOPMENT AGENDA AT WIPO

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Most of you may be familiar with the efforts of developing countries to introduce a “Development Agenda” at WIPO. For those that came in late (phantom style), here’s the gist from the CPTech website: “On October 4, 2004, the General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization agreed to adopt a proposal offered by Argentina and Brazil, the “Proposal for the Establishment of a Development Agenda for WIPO” (sometimes referred to as “Item 12” because of its placement listing on

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