Central Govt. dragged to the High Court over securities tribunal: When will the Govt. learn?

/ By / Uncategorized

The struggle against the Central Government apathy towards the tribunal system, including the IP tribunals, continues with yet another Public Interest Litigation filed by Delhi based lawyers in the High Court of Delhi questioning, amongst other practices, the functioning of the Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) without the presence of a Presiding Officer. The tribunal is a three member tribunal, with two members and one Presiding Officer who is required by the SEBI Act to be a retired judge of the […]

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Guest Post: "HMT: Time to share benefits with our farmers?"

/ By / Plant Variety Protection

The earlier version of this post had some missing paragraphs due to formatting issues with blogger and hence I’m reposting this same post with the necessary corrections.Mrinalini Kochupillai, who has previously guest blogged for us over here and here, with regard to the Plant Varieties Act, has sent us this expose on how a University in Maharashtra appears to be misappropriating the rights to a certain variety of rice which was developed by an independent farmer. Like the TKDL story,

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Allegation against ICAR Scientist of falsifying Patent Claim to win Award

/ By / Patent

(Image taken from here)In a rather startling development, an allegation has surfaced recently about a top-notch scientist, engaged in research relating to genetically modified (GM) food crops, having fabricated false claims with an eye to a national award. Dr. Kailash C. Bansal, a senior scientist in Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), had on July 16, 2009 been presented with the renowned Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Award for the exceptional research that he had conducted in transgenic crops in 2007-2008. The

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5 Reasons Why Course Packs are Legal in India

/ By / Copyright

The recent order passed against Delhi University restraining it and Rameswhari Photocopy Service from producing course packs provides the context for this post. Quite simply, the order does not even begin to consider the applicable defences and held course packs to be illegal in India. The following points demonstrate why they are in fact legal under current Indian law. Current Indian law allows reproduction in the course of instruction  Section 52(1)(i)(i) of the Indian Copyright Act says ‘reproduction of a

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Academia struggles to pay up as Journal prices soar!

/ By / Uncategorized

What is “Open Access”? Explained by PhD comics In yet another story headlining publishing houses, India’s top science officials have expressed concern over not being able to afford subscriptions to international science journals, budgeted at Rs 500 crores for the 5 year period covered by the 12th five-year plan (2012-2017).  The issue is concisely captured in the quote in the LiveMint article here: ““I’ll try my best to get this (budget for journals) passed, though I doubt whether the Planning Commission

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First sale doctrine under threat in US

/ By / Copyright

image from here While Hurricane Sandy has shut down most of the east coast of US, one of the only official buildings still open in Washington DC on Monday was the Supreme Court, as they heard arguments in the Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons case, a case revolving around the extent of ‘protection’ that copyright owners should get.  Textbook prices, it appears, are a problem world over. It makes sense. Without getting into whether it is good policy or

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Guest Post: Ownership and Assignment of Indian Patent Applications

/ By / Patent

Image from here One of our long time readers, Dr. V. Shankar, has sent us this nuanced guest post on some of the oft-ignored legal & policy issues regarding the registration of title of an Indian patent especially in its pre-grant avatar. By way of introduction, Dr. Shankar is a materials engineer and a registered Indian patent agent with Maxval-IP, a company that provides services and solutions to optimize patent lifecycle management. Maxval is head-quartered in Los Altos, USA and

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Supreme Court grants BharatMatrimony stay against Shaadi.com

/ By / Trademark

Last week a three judge bench of the Supreme Court passed an order restraining Shaadi.com and other rival matrimonial websites from infringing BharatMatrimony’s trade mark. This was in response to a SLP filed by Consim Info P. Ltd, that whenever BharatMatrimony’s name was keyed in on Google search, the names of the rival websites appeared on the right hand side in the Ad words column. Earlier The Madras High Court had refused to pass an order restraining Google and other

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IP in the multiverse: Law of Superheroes

/ By / Uncategorized

The leading American patent law blog, Patently O, reminds us that even serious law folk can have a lighter side once in a while (though not often enough, I would say). James Dailey and Ryan Davidson, bloggers of Law and the Multiverse, have turned their blog into a book “Law of Superheroes” that will be a delight to all comic-geek lawyers. As excerpted from Patently O:  (T)he book answers many IP questions that may have vexed comic book readers: Does Batman’s

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Govt. of India follows up on SpicyIP reporting – revokes Avesthagen patent – first Indian victory for TKDL

/ By / Patent

Image from here Six months after we had first reported on how Avesthagen was proceeding with its Indian patent application, despite abandoning the EPO equivalent of the same after objections raised by the EPO and the TKDL, the ToI has reported that the Government of India has now revoked the Indian patent in question.  We had initially covered this Avesthagen patent application (1076/CHE/2007) for “synergistic ayurvedic/functional food bioactive composition” in context of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). That post

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