Shamnad drew my attention to a recent news report in the Business Standard, “Law not Equipped to Handle Pharma Monopoly: Experts” The report states: “With anti-competitive practices of global pharma companies increasingly coming under regulatory scrutiny internationally, Indian public interest groups and the domestic medicine makers complain that India’s competitive laws are not equipped to face a similar situation of monopoly in the sales of patent protected medicines in the country.” The report provides two view points: (1) Leena Menghaney,…

While the battles in file sharing rage across the world it’s nice to see that in Germany there still seems to be some dichotomy of opinion. RapidShare responsible for copyright violations of users, court saysContributed by Wolfgang GruenerThursday, January 31, 2008 10:42.Duesseldorf (Germany) German content licensing authority GEMA says it has achieved and importantvictory” against RapidShare, which allows users to save and share files. A district ruled in favor of GEMA and confirmed that RapidShare has to take responsibility for…

With this article reported in the Guardian we see the fight against file sharing spreads to more countries. We all watched with growing apprehension for our music collections as Napster, Grokster, Kazaa and Morpheus got shut down in the USA. Australia followed with a 140 page judgement on why Kazaa was better gone and now Sweden has joined the fray.Sweden has charged “Pirate Bay” with being an “accessory” to infringement. The owners of Pirate Bay have sought refuge under the…

In conjunction with the post that’s just been put up relating to the XLRI and NIF MoU I wanted to add a little note on the extension of the IPR system to traditional knowledge. The advantage of extending the existing IPR system to protect traditional knowledge is that it will generate incentives amongst indigenous peoples to conserve and protect their culture and environment. This assumption is drawn from the experience of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in Australia…