Author name: Thomas J. Vallianeth

Thomas is a final year law student at the National Law University, Jodhpur pursuing a B.Sc. LL.B. (IP Hons.) course. His first exposure to IP law was at a workshop that he attended in High School and ever since then, he has pursued a keen interest in the field. However, his real interests lie in the interfaces between Technology Law and IP, with an active interest in the Open Source movement.

A Belated SpicyIP Weekly Review (10th -16th March, 2014)

This week saw some interesting activity on SpicyIP as well as in the world of IP itself. We began with Gopika informing us about the WIPO-WTO colloquium for teachers of IP. The colloquium was opened to lawyers, researchers, university teachers and economists working in the field. She reports that there are twenty-two places in the colloquium for applicants from developing countries and countries with economies in transition whose travel, accommodation and subsistence costs would be covered by the organizers. Applicants …

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Spicyip Tidbit: The 2015 Rankings for Programs in IP and Tech Law in the US are Out!

As LLM admission responses start to roll out, Hal Wegner brings our attention to something IP focused LLM applicants may be interested in. The 2015 U.S. News rankings for IP programs in U.S. universities are out and there are some big moves on the ranking table – both up and down. Stanford University’s IP program moves to the top of the list while Berkley drops down to second. The significant movers are DePaul, Fordham, Suffolk, Penn and UCLA, each university …

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Of Deceptive Similarity, Vacating of Injunctions and Country Liquor

H v. H High Court of Bombay Text of the judgement can be found here The Bombay High Court recently refused to vacate an injunction granted to a country liquor distillery in a trademark and copyright dispute against another distiller for alleged infringement and passing off. In doing so, the court relied on Cadila to examine the similarities between the two labels. The court also observed that the appellate court was merely to examine whether the discretion of the lower …

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Delhi HC Vacates Injunction Granted in Favour of Steelbird – Design not New or Original

Steelbird Hi-Tech India Ltd. v. S.P.S. Gambhir and Ors. Text of the judgement available here. The Delhi High Court recently (Feb. 24, 2014) vacated an ex-parte interim injunction granted in favour of helmet makers Steelbird. Justice Manmohan Singh ruled that the registered design on the basis of which Steelbird had initiated infringement proceedings against S.P.S Gambhir and Others was not “new or original”. Facts of the Case: Steelbird Hi-Tech India Ltd. is a company that is engaged in the business …

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Rare diseases and Innovation

We must applaud ourselves. We must applaud ourselves because we have toiled and advocated the causes of affordable healthcare and access to drugs. We have fought for cancer and malaria medication to be made available at naught a cost to the poor, ailing millions (well with cancer we tried anyway). While battle lines are yet being drawn, as we face up against Big Pharma and the corrupt, rickety governments that ensure they guzzle all our money, there is a group …

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Copyright to Effect Censorship?

IPKat recently carried a post reporting that Spain was contemplating introducing an amendment in their laws to allow for press publishers to monetize their content for a fixed period of time. This might seem like an alarming development (more on that later on in the blog post) but IPKat reports that this has been tried by a number of other countries as well. These are Germany, Italy, Belgium and even France. We have reported earlier on this blog about the …

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Analysing the AFTI’s Report for the Special 301 Investigation

The Alliance for Fair Trade with India (AFTI) submitted a report to the Office of the Trade Representative of the United States as a part of the ongoing Special 301 investigation into India’s IP policies, that they perceive as prejudicial to US nationals. They recommended that India be listed as a Priority Foreign Country (PFC) in the investigation.  A Special 301 report issued under S.301 of the Trade Act of 1974 attempts to identify countries that, “that (a) deny adequate …

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Weekly Review (2-8 Feb, 2014)

The past week was a fairly interesting week in the world of IP and we carried a number of posts reporting some of these developments. The first post of the week was a post by one of our new Fellows – Spadika where she reported on the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (“NPTEL”), a program similar to the MIT Open Course Ware, which provides online courseware for students to bridge the oft complained about gap in qualifications of faculty …

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Auto Tuned Videos and Copyright

Satire on YouTube seems to be stirring up quite the controversy. Some time ago, it was regarding the spoof of Dhoom 3 which YRF had objected to, on which we carried a post which observed how parodies could constitute fair use. More recently, Rohit Iyengar, an 18 year old film student, uploaded an auto tuned version of one of Rahul Gandhi’s speeches delivered at an AICC meeting, in a video titled “Rahul Gandhi sings”. Within no time the video was …

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