Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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Closer to a censored society

/ By / Copyright

Pic from here Being currently based out of India, I hadn’t noticed it myself, but a lot of my friends were complaining about several file-sharing sites and video sites being blocked or censored. And it appears that even Anonymous’ attention has been drawn to these incidences. More on that shortly.  I’ve looked into what other sources are saying and it appears that at least a portion of the ‘censorship’ seems to be due to an interim injunction order issued by […]

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Kenyan Court holds Anti-Counterfeit Act unconstitutional

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UNAIDS Executive Director welcoming the decision A couple of years ago we had blogged about the controversial Kenyan Anti-Counterfeit Act that had been passed in 2008. At that time, I had written that its broad definition of counterfeits would include generics and would be severely problematic: “The problematic part of the legislation is that it recognises intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical products registered in any part of the world and not just in the country of export or import….  The legislation

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Ranting on the confused concept of ‘IPR’

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As one browses through the current affairs of the intellectual property world, definite trends and patterns are easily noticeable. International IP institutions continue to work towards upward harmonization – more stringent standards. More awareness campaigns are being spread to inform people about intellectual property rights and their value. While intellectual property rights are getting more standardized and harmonized, I often wonder something more fundamental. Why should they be – in any sense? I know how it’s happening – a few whispers

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Incentivising Diseases?

/ By / Innovation

Image from here In the recent post on India’s first post TRIPS era compulsory license, a comment by Hersh Sewek brought up a very relevant question of how, if at all, this affects the innovation eco-system in India. Shamnad pointed out that very few papers have been written about the effects of such licenses on incentives to innovate. Indeed, there’s little concrete information on the amount of incentives required to bring about an increase in innovation. Let’s zoom out of

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Let’s divide the internet!

/ By / Copyright

For those not familiar with internet meme’s, this is “Insanity Wolf’, who as the name suggests, does not always follow the sane means of achieving his goals. In a move that could potentially mark the beginning of a divided, monitored and censored internet, blogspot has started redirecting users to country specific sites by introducing country-code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs). If you look in the address bar of your browser, our Indian readers will likely see spicyipindia.blogspot.in instead of .com (and

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Public Health players combine forces

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January 30th marked an unprecedented level of cooperation between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, several top pharmaceutical companies, governments and other big players in the public health field towards combating and attempting to eliminate 10 neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) by the end of the decade. These NTDs affect about 1.4 billion people a year and primarily those in developing countries and LDCs.  “Uniting to Combat Neglected Tropical Diseases“, which was held in London yesterday, marked several sizable contributions and

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Contrasting international opinion on file-sharing!

/ By / Copyright

Image from here Big Bully is watching your Government It’s no surprise to anyone that countries with means do what they can do ‘negotiate’ with other countries to have them see their way. While the US places not so subtle pressure on several countries through their annual Special 301 Reports, a recent wikileaks cable between US and Spain has shown that the US may have stepped over  the ‘pressure’ line and moved into the ‘threatening’ zone. Part of the message

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CJEU rules against in-transit seizures by Custom officials

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image from here Readers may recall the in-transit seizures which caused a furor about a couple of years ago. A brief recap: Several consignments of generic medicines had been detained while they were in transit from India to other developing / least developed countries by the EU customs under EC Regulation 1383/2003. The 1383 regulation amended border protection mechanisms, so that member states could take certain customs action against goods suspected of infringing intellectual property rights, and also laid down the measures

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"Creation of the WTO" videos

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A very interesting set of video interviews with many of the people involved in and during the birth of the WTO have been compiled and put on a youtube channel available here. Prof Gabrielle Marceau initiated this project. As described on the channel, “This project began as a tribute to Ambassador Paul Trân Van Thinh on the occasion of his 80th birthday. We set out to retrace, through interviews with friends and colleagues, Paul Trân’s exceptional journey. Paul Trân, who

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India proposes new UN body for Internet related policies

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Image from here  Indirectly connected, yet relevant background stories: 1. US tries to extradite British student for the purely online activity of hosting a site that links to infringing material. Linked here. (In context: search engines such as Google do the same thing.) 2. “No! to ACTA” video gets more than 1 million hits – showing netizens’ interests in protecting their online freedom. Linked here.  (Short crisp video – Highly recommended watch!) 3. 108 top IP academics protest against ironically named “PROTECT-IP Act”.

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