Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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“King Copyright” has no place in a Democracy

/ By / Copyright

A few weeks ago, the Centre for Internet and Society and the Observer Research Foundation organized a conference focusing on “Freedom of Expression in a Digital Age” in association with the Internet Policy Observatory of the Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. For their panel on “Balancing Freedom of Expression and other digital rights”, I was invited to discuss Copyrights in this context. While I wasn’t able to make it to the Conference, I did send in a […]

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National IPR Policy – Who Makes it in India?!

/ By / Innovation, Others, Overlaps in IP, Patent

[Long post ahead. But it mostly consists of a timeline of events regarding formation of / comments on Indian IP policy over the last 9 months – a timeline that paints a very worrying picture!]. [Editor’s note: Minor additions have been made to the timeline based on comments received – 6/5/2015] Last week, in an email Shamnad sent to our subscribers, as well as in my post “Modi shames India, calls patent laws under-developed“, we noted how Modi’s referral to

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Modi shames India, calls patent laws under-developed

/ By / Innovation, Patent

In a stark volte-face from decades of where the Indian government has stood on its patent laws, the Indian Prime Minister recently issued some worrying lines, with very worrisome public-health implications. As per Business Standard, “Though he spoke in Hindi, what he said was to the effect that “India must also work on intellectual property rights guidelines to match global standards.“” LiveMint reports further – that while speaking at the Commerce Ministry’s first Global Exhibition on Services, Modi said,  “If we don’t work towards bringing our

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Faith (in IP) be damned! (But Happy World IP Day!)

/ By / Innovation, Others, Privacy

Thanks to the social media turn of more and more academics, I recently came across a new essay by Prof Mark Lemley, one of the most prolific IP personalities around today, focusing specifically on an issue we’ve noted as problematic for years on the blog now – the conflict between “Faith” and “Fact” based IP. From World IP Day in 2008 (“Faith based IP to Fact based IP“), to a post just a couple of months ago (“Dodgy IP Dogma“) –

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Tidbit: Job Opportunity at International Trademark Association

/ By / Sponsored, Trademark

We’d like to remind our readers of this job opportunity at INTA. Please note, the deadline to apply is Today – April 22nd, 2015. Read on for more: An exciting opportunity has opened up at the International Trademark Association (INTA). The role is for an India Consultant, to be based out of New Delhi.  The Consultant is expected to provide consultancy services to INTA; specifically assist in strengthening INTA’s presence in the country by supporting policy efforts throughout the region; growing

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SJM, Sangh Parivar’s economic wing, raises concerns with draft IPR Policy

/ By / Others

In a very notable development, Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM), an economic wing of the Sangh Parivar, has raised serious concerns with the draft IPR Policy including concerns over its constituent members. Before I mention what the concerns were, I’ll put forward some background to place these comments in context: The Sangh Parivar is a group of Hindu nationalist organizations (which include the ruling party BJP) that have been founded/inspired by members/ideas of the RSS. While these different organizations within the

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Data exclusivity back on the table for India

/ By / Data Exclusivity, Drug Regulation, Others

D.G. Shah, Secretary General of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance sends us news that will be of interest to many of our readers. He says, “… Government plans to introduce a Pesticides (Amendment) Bill in the Parliament during the current session. The Bill has a provision that not only makes India’s Intellectual Property (IP) regime TRIPS Plus but would also eliminate competition and create legal monopoly for agro-chemicals and pesticides making them unaffordable to small farmers. The Bill proposes to introduce

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New Wikileaks of TPP Investment chapter

/ By / Drug Regulation, Others, Patent

Earlier this morning, Wikileaks put out a draft Investment chapter of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement, dated 20th January, 2015. To quote Julian Assange on this: “The TPP has developed in secret an unaccountable supranational court for multinationals to sue states. This system is a challenge to parliamentary and judicial sovereignty. Similar tribunals have already been shown to chill the adoption of sane environmental protection, public health and public transport policies.” We’ve previously written about the leaked IP chapter

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India puts Draft Model Bilateral Investment Treaty up for comments

/ By / Others, Patent

MyGov.in, the government’s online platform for ‘Citizen Participation towards Good Governance’, has a Draft Indian Model Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) text that is up for comments till 5pm, April 10th 2015. The platform has in fact made it very easy to comment by providing a comment box type feature not too different from most websites’ comments feature. You can find the text as well as the place to comment at this link here. I’ve just skimmed through the text so

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Guest Post: Shouldn’t We Liberate Laws from the Clutches of Copyright Law?

/ By / Copyright

We’re delighted to bring our readers a very pertinent guest post by a dear friend of the blog, Dr. Arul George Scaria, assistant professor at National Law University, Delhi – discussing a very basic issue that, if memory serves me right, has somehow escaped our attention on this blog! While we have earlier discussed whether “standards” can/should be copyrighted (see post here), the current post deals with the issue of the very text of our laws being copyrighted. We’d love

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