Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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India, Brazil start dispute proceedings against EU.

In what is hopefully the beginning of the end of the controversial EU regulation 1383/2003, under which seizures have been taking place at borders of EU countries for drugs in transit from and to developing countries, last week India and Brazil launched a trade dispute against EU by requesting for consultation proceedings. SpicyIP has been following this dispute in a series of posts since its development.  As per the WTO dispute settlement proceedings, now there are two possible outcomes. The […]

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Guest Post: Tales from Decrypt Dept.

SpicyIP is happy to bring our readers yet another great guest post by Nikhil Krishnamurthy, this time on Section 65A of the Copyright Amendment Bill. (For some of his other great guest posts on Spicy IP, check here) Tales from Decrypt Dept. (“But Officer, I was told it was “fine” to circumvent !”) I have written extensively about some of the author-centric amendments sought to be introduced by The Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010 here. I would like to now share

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Guest post: Lights, Camera, ACTA(ion)

Continuing from his previous guest post, Amlan Mohanty brings us a follow up post on the ACTA, attempts at harmonization, and using New Zealand’s example to oppose certain measures at the international level. The Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, Country specific responses and Lessons for India In this post, I intend to bring out the overlapping issues with regard to the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the specific provisions dealing with technological protection measures (TPM’s) and anti-circumvention contained therein, the responses

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OSDD successfully maps TB Genome

The government sponsored CSIR programme, the Open Source Drug Discovery (OSDD) (which we have written about previously here) on Sunday, announced that they had successfully completed the first ever mapping of the Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (MTB) genome. The MTB gene was sequenced more than a decade ago. However of the 4000 genes, only 1000 had been annotated before the start of this online project. Known as ‘Connect 2 Decode’ (C2D) and started in late 2008, the project was unique, in that

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Spicy IP Tidbit: Cross Retaliation by Brazil succeeds

In what surely represents a big victory for Brazil, after its long standing dispute with USA over their illegal cotton subsidies, Brazil and US have reached a preliminary agreement just 1 day before Brazil was to start enforcing sanctions of $830 million against US. The sanctions were to include $591 million in the form of higher tariffs on a wide range of goods, as well as $239 million in the form of cross-retaliatory measures against American intellectual property. Brazil would’ve

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DRMs in the draft Copyright Amendments

Recently, we’ve had a well written guest post by Amlan Mohanty, wherein he discusses several conceptual and practical problems with laws for the anti-circumvention of technological measures. As pointed out in the post, India is not a member of the WIPO Treaties such as WCT (WIPO Copyright Treaty) or WPPT (WIPO Performances and Phonogram Treaty), and therefore is not obligated to be importing/implementing DRM provisions into the Copyright law, not to mention that it is a TRIPS plus provision; yet,

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Spicy IP Tidbit: US Court rules that all non-US copyright owners must register their Copyright

Some useful information for all non-US copyright holders who may need to file a suit in the US for copyright infringement: An article on Mondaq by James Trigg and Harris W. Henderson, points out an interesting decision [Elsevier B.V. v. UnitedHealth Group, Inc., No, 9 Civ. 2124 (S.D.N.Y. January, 14, 2010)] by the Southern District Court of New York which affects all non-US copyright holders.In brief, the article points out that the court essentially held that certain formality-requiring provisions of

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Hollywood, Bollywood tying up to fight piracy

There are reports that Hollywood and Bollywood are launching a joint initiative against piracy in India. The MPAA on behalf of Hollywood, and seven Indian companies have decided to join together to fight counterfeiting of film copyrights. Indeed, with one of the largest movie industries in the world, there is certainly a large problem of copyright infringement, with nearly all released movies being made available illegally. While its applaudable that they are striving harder to recognize and protect copyrights, this

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iCopyright? iCopywrong? Whither fairness?

While I was starting to write a post (to be put up soon) on the MPAA joining 7 Indian companies something very interesting caught my eye. I wanted to post a short excerpt from the Associated Press article that I first saw it from, but was stopped by something I found rather peculiar. Scrolling down, at the bottom of the article I saw a hyperlink provided by iCopyright, entitled “click here for copyright permissions”. I had intended on excerpting a

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Brazil set to Cross-Retaliate against US

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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