Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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Apple v. Samsung – An ‘innovative’ decision?

/ By / Innovation

“ For us this lawsuit has always been about something much more important than patents or money. It’s about values. We value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth.”  – Tim Cook, in his memo to Apple’s corporate employees after the $1.049 billion dollar verdict that went Apple’s way in it’s smartphone patent battle with Samsung, in US District Court, Northern District of California.     “Good artists copy. Great artists steal”  – Steve Jobs, […]

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SpicyIP’s Weekly Review

/ By / Copyright, Patent

A new feature that our SpicyIP team will be serving you is a weekly roundup of notable IP developments both in and out of India. Image from NYtimes The highlight of the week is undoubtedly the huge Apple-Samsung verdict announced late Friday evening. In an extraordinarily short period of time (3 days) the federal jury in a Californian court came to its conclusion and awarded $1.051 billion to Apple in damages while finding Samsung guilty on most counts of infringement. A

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SCP’s Questionnaire on Exceptions and Limitations to Patents

/ By / Patent

Recently WIPO’s Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) sent out a questionnaire to member states regarding member state’s exceptions and limitations to patent rights. The responses have come in and inadvertently a terrific resource for comparing and contrasting different nuances of patent laws in various countries has been formed. For instance, the public policy objectives of each exception and limitation that a state has are now conveniently listed and displayed; as well as whether the state has concluded

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An improved prior art search tool – Google Patents

/ By / Patent

While I might not have been too happy with the update from Google yesterday, the update from Google a few hours ago certainly seems like good news. Google already allows users to search through the entire corpus of US patents and starting this week, they have also added the applications that have been submitted to the European Patent Office.  Not only that, they have also added a specific ‘prior art finder‘ that looks remarkably useful. Once a search result is

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Google may need to change their motto

/ By / Copyright

Coming this week, Google will be making what could be a ground breaking step in it’s search algorithm. Google will start downranking sites in proportion to the the number of valid copyright removal notices that the site receives. According to Google, “This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily”. While on the surface, this seems like a good anti-piracy move, I shall explain why I think it could be a major problem.  I had

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New Prize dwarfs Nobel prize money; Indian awarded

/ By / Innovation

Ashoke Sen A new annual prize called The Fundamental Physics Prize has been instituted by Russian internet mogul Yuri Milner and it’s prize money of $3 million each, more than doubles the Nobel Prize which is currently $1.2 million, which is usually shared by 2-3 people. Mr Milner personally selected this year’s winners but winners from next year onwards will be selected by the previous year’s winners. The prize was awarded to 9 people this year and for a change an

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Internet Association Lobby formed

/ By / Privacy

In what is bound to change the terms of negotiations of internet related legislation, 4 of the largest internet companies have come together with other undisclosed companies to form the Internet Association Lobby. The four are Google, Facebook, Amazon and Ebay, led by former (US) Congressional staffer Michael Beckerman. While the coming together of these 4 super-heavyweights is potentially scenery changing, the only common ground that I can see is net-neutrality and of course the stronger possibility for tax-breaks now. Net-neutrality, essentially

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India 64th in Global Innovation Index

/ By / Innovation

India dropped a couple of places from its last year’s ranking of 62 to rank 64 this year on the Global Innovation Index (GII) which is prepared by INSEAD and WIPO. India’s rank has consistently dropped over the years – 62nd in 2011, 56th in 2010 and 41st in 2009.   Switzerland, Sweden and Singapore once again took the top 3 places, while the Republic of Moldova was the top Lower Middle Income country at 50. China, which topped the Lower Middle group

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Yet another problematic acronym – the IPAA

/ By / Uncategorized

ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, COICA, even TPP… and now IPAA. And that is without considering the various bilateral treaty negotiations (CETA being the newest one to hit the headlines). If there were points in life for trying to maximise IP regimes, it seems certain Hollywood lobbyists (and others) would be getting top scores. (For fun, try to read that top line out loud as fast as you can) While the EU is trying to push ACTA provisions in the backdoor (after rejecting it in

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Exit ACTA, Enter TPP

/ By / Copyright, Patent

Image from here “A secretive, multi-national trade agreement that threatens to impose restrictive intellectual property laws all over the globe”- sounds like ACTA, right? And ACTA effectively died a few days ago when the European parliament clearly rejected it, so there should be nothing to worry about.  Unfortunately, that quoted line is not about ACTA but rather describes the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). It’s however more expansive than ACTA and potentially far more destructive. Here’s a brief update about it: 

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