Author name: Swaraj Paul Barooah

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An overview of the ‘Health Impact Fund’ model for accessible medicines

/ By / Innovation

A few quick facts before I jump into my post. US, EU and Japan together account for roughly 90% of the revenues received by pharmaceutical firms, and thus by far, are their largest money generators.  Developed countries comprise of 16-20% of the global population Neglected diseases (or Type III diseases) receive about 2-3% of the global pharmaceutical R&D  Even India, the ‘pharmacy of the developing world’, only 10% of R&D funding of the top 12 leading Indian pharma companies focus […]

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Patent Pools as Innovation Policy

/ By / Innovation, Patent

A few days ago marked the final step in the establishment of UNITAID initiated patent pool, with negotiations with drug companies expected to start soon. This got me thinking about the viability of patent pools as a concept, in the endeavour to create better, cheaper (or in some cases, just create) drugs for developing country diseases. As a clarification, I do not know exactly what kind of model UNITAID’s patent pool is using. I am simply raising some general questions

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SpicyIP Tidbit: US NGOs go after GWU IP summit too

/ By / Uncategorized

Recently we had posted on the controversies surrounding the GWU-CII summit, primarily alleging that GWU had allowed the summit to be used for propaganda by Big Pharma. While Indian civil organisations had written letters to the Minister of Commerce earlier, 9 US NGOs have now also written to GWU calling for a stop to the fronting of biased industry-sponsored training in India. These include NGOs such as Universities Allied for Essential Medicines, MSF, Oxfam, KEI, etc.  Notably, the letter specifically points

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India, Brazil start dispute proceedings against EU.

/ By / Uncategorized

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.

/ By / Copyright

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)

/ 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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