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Swaraj Paul Barooah

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Brazil set to Cross-Retaliate against US

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Brazil seems to be all set to be the first country to use the IP Cross Retaliation provisions of the WTO, after their approval last year by the WTO. Earlier today, Brazil revealed a preliminary list (subject to a public hearing) of restrictions and suspensions on various areas of IP of US goods and products. Cross-retaliation essentially refers to the right of a country to retaliate against an offending country through means of retaliating against a sector of an agreement…


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SpicyIP Tidbits: India trendy on IP matters!

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Whiling away some time on the internet, I decided to check Google Trends – which ranks countries based on the frequency of the search term entered – for ‘patents’, ‘copyrights’, ‘ipr’, ‘intellectual property rights’, ‘intellectual property laws’, etc. To my surprise, I found that, with the exception of one or two search terms, India is far, far ahead of any other country for almost every IP-related search term!Even for terms where India was not on top, such as ‘trademarks’, ‘innovation’,…


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Innovation Patent

Patents and Innovation

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Recently in our SpicyIP (web) office, Sumathi pointed out an interesting article in the Economist to us. The article was pretty dramatic, to the extent that it essentially called patents nonsense. Indeed, it posted its fair share of examples of frivolous patents in support of its argument. However, in the course of our discussion over the article, Kruttika and I took decidedly different positions on how valid such a view was. We decided to do two contrast posts on the…


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Copyright

Time to Act on ACTA

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The shroud of secrecy around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) has arguably become a little more transparent during the past 2 years of negotiation, albeit due more to leaks more than positive acts towards transparency. (Readers may recall our previous posts on ACTA) Civil societies, nonprofits and blogs have also played an important part in this by constantly questioning the suspicious nature of its negotiations, not to mention the (leaked) provisions themselves. The agreement, which is supposed to be completed…


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Patent

SpicyIP Tidbit: WHO is Looking after Flu Scares?

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An Inter-Governmental meeting this week of the Executive Board Members of the WHO, saw concerns on several different issues being discussed. Regarding a way towards an influenza framework, it was agreed that they would try to complete a framework for dealing with influenza in time for the World Health Assembly in May later this year. One of the main issues discussed was that of development and distribution of vaccines. The usual developed – developing line roughly divided the groups, with…


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Others

Access to Food now an IP issue?

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Aggressive patent protection is now apparently leading two US based Non profit organizations to challenge patents of nut based product “Plumpy’nut”, owned by Malaunay, France-based company, Nutriset. The two US nonprofits want to produce a high-protein, nut based food product which is extremely beneficial for the malnourished/undernourished. The product provides 500 calorie dosages of vitamins and minerals, and several health experts have agreed that this type of product is greatly beneficial in treating severely malnourished children. (image taken from here)…


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Fair comments on "Fake Drugs" ?

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Recently, two analysts from International Policy Network, London wrote a piece entitled “Fake scare about Fake drugs” alleging that claims of ‘over-protection of intellectual property rights’ and at the same time, ‘not protecting patients interests’, which are being used by developmental NGOs (in their words, “Oxfam and other activist NGOs”), are false as well as dangerous. I would like to take this chance to react to their article, published by IP-Watch, as it contains a number of disputable, if not…


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Liberalization of Foreign Technology Agreement Policy

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There is good news for the Indian technological industry. The Government of India yesterday (17th Dec), issued a Press Release stating that it has reviewed its foreign technology agreement policy to no longer require government approval, with immediate effect. The prior policy freely allowed payments and remittances up to a lumpsum fee of $2million and royalty payments of 5% on domestic sales and 8% on exports. Payments above this required regulatory approval.
 The new policy removes any such restrictions on…


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See-sawing at Copenhagen

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With hardly any time remaining for discussions at ‘Hopenhagen’, the position of IP in the treaty text continues to remain ambiguous, see-sawing between a number of IP references being mentioned (1st draft), to IP not being mentioned explicitly at all (2nd draft) , and back to IP being mentioned again in the 3rd draft text (provided by IP-Watch here) on the development and transfer of technology at the 7-18th December United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) being held at Copenhagen….


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Spicy IP Jobs: Research position at Neuchatel University

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As part of the EU-funded Access to Pharmaceuticals (ATP) consortium, The Institute of Health Law at the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland is seeking to fill a position of a Scientific Collaborator in an international research project on IP and Access to Pharmaceutical Products and for running the part on Compulsory Licensing, in the framework of the EU 7th Framework Programme (FP7). The ATP consortium recognizes the importance of equitable access to pharmaceuticals, especially in developing countries, and as such, focuses…


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