Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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Guest post: Lights, Camera, ACTA(ion)

/ By / Copyright

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

/ By / Patent

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

/ By / Uncategorized

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

/ By / Copyright

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

/ By / 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

/ By / Copyright

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?

/ By / Copyright

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

/ By / Uncategorized

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!

/ By / Uncategorized

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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Patents and Innovation

/ By / Innovation, Patent

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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