Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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March 2nd marks aggravated protests against FTA

/ By / Data Exclusivity

While the government continues to march on with the EU-India FTA, protester’s have also continued to voice their concerns over the impact that the IP provisions of the draft Agreement will have on making medicines inaccessible. March 2nd marked a day of protest by health activists from across India including PLHIV Networks and Network of People who use Drugs, as well as activists from affected countries such as Nepal, Indonesia, Thailand and Philippines who came to New Delhi to voice their concerns

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SpicyIP Tidbit: Medicines Patent Pool in talks with Big Pharma

/ By / Patent

UNITAID’s Medicines Patent Pool which received it’s first patent late last year is now making more headway by entering into negotiations with several key HIV medicines patent holders. Patent pools work by allowing patent holders to share their IP with other parties via licences. The working of this patent pool in particular therefore relied on the key patent holders contributing their patents to the pool for it work. To the skeptics (me included) of how well this would work, there is

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Submissions invited for USTR’s 2011 Special 301 report

/ By / Uncategorized

The annual Special 301 report is something we’ve covered a bit in the past, and the 2011 edition will be coming out soon. The USTR is requesting comments and submissions to be made for the 2011 edition for the public hearing on March 2nd. The deadline for submitting these is February 15th. For those who don’t know about USTR’s Special 301 Report, it is a unilateral measure taken by the USTR which essentially ranks countries according to how much the

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Wikileaks on ACTA’s development

/ By / Uncategorized

Wikileaks: Giving a helping handImage from here Wikileaks, which first brought our attention to the ACTA back in mid 2008, has now brought attention to the history of how the ACTA came about. Expectedly, it shows that there had been explicit communication regarding the eventual imposition of TRIPS plus standards on developing countries. Somewhat surprisingly however, it appears that the EU behaved as rather weak negotiating party and were not completely happy with how the events unfolded. La Quadrature du Net  has come out

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India, South Africa gain from J&J-generic deal, Patent Pool loses out

/ By / Uncategorized

Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary Tibotec has granted multiple non-exclusive licenses for a new HIV-AIDS treatment to generic manufacturers including Hetero Drugs Ltd, Matrix Laboratories Ltd from India and Aspen Pharmacare from South Africa. The drug in question, rilpivirine hydrochloride (TMC278)  is still pending approval however. Tibotec would recieve 2-5% of what is received for the pills. The press release by Tibotec is available here.  The licensing allows the Indian generic companies to manufacture, market and distribute TMC278 in Least Developed Countries, Sub-Saharan

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EU-India closer to FTA-hampered public health regime?

/ By / Data Exclusivity

Draft IP chapter made available The chapter on IP in the draft EU-India FTA has been made publicly available for the first time. As Malini Aisola has pointed out in her blogpost at CIS, the draft shows India’s rebuff of EU’s stand on several key IP provisions. There is a copy of the draft available here for those interested. [CIS-India has also helpfully compiled a chart comparing the language put forth by India and that put forward by EU, available here]. There seems

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Progress(?) in International Effort to Tackle Pandemics

/ By / Patent

The  ‘Open Ended Working Group” on Pandemic Influenza Preparedness recently completed its 2nd meeting and has resulted in some breakthroughs in the long standing effort by nations to prepare a framework for tackling pandemics, especially for poorer countries which do not have the capacity to develop or receive vaccinations. As usual, there is a developing – developed country divide on certain issues. [William New of IP Watch has an interview with a key negotiator of these meetings here.] The issue which they’ve

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NBA and MoEF’s (non)working un-CAGed

/ By / Biological Diversity

The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), established for the regulation, conservation and sustainable use of natural resources has recently come under the scanner for its failure in notifying important regulations dealing with access to biodiversity, transfer of results of research and intellectual property rights, even though it was set up back in 2003. The castigating report, was brought out by the Comptroller of Auditor General (CAG) as part of its first audit report of the MoEF. (The NBA is under the administrative

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SpicyIP Tidbit: NGOs set up blog for FTA’s effects on Access to Medicine

/ By / Uncategorized

Several NGOs have been protesting the free-trade agreements that are being negotiated due to the detrimental effect that these multilateral and bilateral agreements would have on access to medicines. We too have covered the developments on the India – EU FTA in several posts here.  Recently, DNP+ and MSF Access Campaign India have set up a blog for more active discussion on these issues. “The blog was established to gather information like documents, drafts of agreement’s, news, pictures, videos, press releases

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SpicyIP Tidbit: ACTA Final Text released

/ By / Uncategorized

Thanks to Michael Geist’s tweets and IPKat’s quick follow up, we have news that the final text of the controversial ACTA has just been released, though it’s stated as ‘Subject to Legal Review’.The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Australia has helpfully posted a copy of the text here. This post is just to announce it’s release so that our readers too can go over it, before we go over it in more detail.

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