Short-sighted Doordarshan Drama

/ By / Copyright

Recently, the Delhi High Court issued an interim injunction against Doordarshan in a copyright matter between acclaimed playwright, Dr. Sayeed Alam, well-known Indian actor, Mr. Thomas Alter and Doordarshan. Dr. Alam is the director and script writer for the play Maualana Azad, starring Mr. Alter,which is vastly critically acclaimed. In 2006, the Hindustan Times reported that “Dr. Sayeed Alam’s ‘Maulana Azad’, staged at Bharat Bhavan on Thursday…is a revelation of sorts in the way that it brings various untold points […]

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SpicyIP Tidbit: Monkey Business and Birthday Songs

/ By / Copyright

American copyright law seems to have seen a couple of interesting developments in the last few days. Over this post I’ll quickly give you the rundown on both. You remember the monkey selfie? If you don’t, here’s a quick recap: a British photographer left his camera unattended in an Indonesian forest, allowing a particularly enterprising (and handsome, in Swaraj’s telling of the story) macaque to pick it up, play around with the buttons and take a bunch of selfies. The

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The good that Martin Shkreli has done

/ By / Drug Regulation, Innovation, Patent

As many of our readers may have heard by now, Martin Shkreli, ex-hedge fund manager and current founder and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals is currently in the eye of a torrid storm of anger after he increased the price of Daraprim overnight from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill. This 5500% increase came within 2 months of acquiring the rights to the drug from Impax laboratories. Daraprim is a treatment for toxoplasmosis, which affects people whose immune systems have been weakened by chemotherapy,

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Oh how the mighty fall ! – SC dismisses IPRS’ Special Leave Petition

/ By / Copyright

It’s been a few years since SpicyIP first started tracking IPRS and its illegal exploits. Today, we’re rather pleased to announce that the notorious extortionists-cum-serial scamsters have finally, FINALLY, been cornered, and justice to the hundreds of rights-holders defrauded out of their money is fast approaching. On 11th September, the Supreme Court dismissed the Special Leave Petition in IPRS v. Union of India (covered here), filed by IPRS in the hope of getting the order passed against them by the

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Through the Looking Lenz – A discourse on Fair Use

/ By / Copyright

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit last week issued its landmark ruling in the case of Lenz v. Universal, arguably changing the face of fair use and takedown notices from the ground up. This post analyses the theoretical idea of ‘fair use’ in the context of the Court’s ruling in this case compared with existing Indian law, also commenting on the true nature of fair use in copyright law. Background The rather famous case of Lenz v.

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New CRI Guidelines Seem to be a Result of Patent Office Overreach

/ By / Patent

Troubling times lie ahead for the Indian IT sector as the recently released Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions seem to have opened the backdoor to software patenting. While the intention of the Patent Office in releasing these Guidelines may have simply been to help foster some clarity and uniformity in patent office practice, the language of the Guidelines paves the way for some unexpected policy changes. Several policy think tanks including iSpirt, Software Freedom Law Centre, Centre for Internet and Society, etc have expressed

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Weekly Review (14th to 20th September)

/ By / Others

Our Highlight of the Week this week is Mathews’ detailed and fascinating post on the PIL filed by Prof. Basheer on Patent Working in India, the third in its series. Having established the factual and theoretical bases for his argument in the previous two posts in the series, he starts of this post by taking forward the argument of the importance of the ‘patent working’ norms. He details the ‘patent working’ scheme as set in the Patents Act, 1970, putting

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Blast from the Past: To Kill a Mockingbird

/ By / Copyright, Others

The biggest literary event this year was the release of ‘Go Set a Watchman’, Harper Lee’s much awaited sequel to the book ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. The author who had shunned all limelight since the publication of her first book has been the subject of much speculation at the hands of literary enthusiasts; Harper Lee, who vowed to never publish a book after her maiden novel, generated a great deal of interest and controversy in the literary world when Lee’s

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Global Innovation Index 2015: Looking at India’s performance

/ By / Innovation

The Global Innovation Index (GII) 2015, released yesterday, saw India ranked a disappointing 81 out of the 141 countries surveyed. Topping the list for the 5th year running is Switzerland, followed by UK and Sweden. The GII, currently in its 8th edition, is an annual report co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Using 79 indicators from over 30 international sources, and with a transparent and replicable computation methodology, it is widely recognized as the

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Punitive Damages and the Defendant’s wealth : An overlooked nexus?

/ By / Trademark

In a recent matter before Justice Manmohan Singh of the Delhi HC, the plaintiff, Honeywell International Co. was granted a permanent injunction restraining infringement of their trademark. They were further awarded punitive damages in addition to cost of proceedings, to the tune of three lac rupees. The case itself is not a complicated one and interested readers can check the order directly for more details on it. Perhaps, however, the highlight of the judgement in this case is the award

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