Of ties, school ties and alumni

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School ties are easy enough to get rid of. Mine was navy blue, with sky blue stripes on it. Not very pretty, but I have still kept it, grudgingly, to remind me of those horror-some years. But college ties are a completely different story. As I was to discover in the three years after school. It’s been a while since, but college is still not out of mind. (image from here) But enough about me and my collection of ties. […]

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Reflecting on the Transparency Crusade

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The genesis of SpicyIP in 2005 had strong roots in the fervent desire to weed out corruption at Indian IP offices, by interalia, fostering greater levels of transparency. While we’ve witnessed some modest success along the way, it really falls several notches short of what we initially set out to do. All of us have day jobs/preoccupations that cast serious limitations on the time that we have at our disposal, but that is no excuse. The road to transparency has

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Roche files a total of ten law suits for infringement of its ‘erlotinib’ patent – IN 196774

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While Novartis was the first land mark case on Section 3(d), it was the Roche-Cipla tussle over Indian Patent No. 196774, which laid down the first judicial precedent for the grant of interim injunctions in the case of infringement of pharmaceutical patents. This infringement suit was filed in January, 2008 and Justice Bhat subsequently delivered orders on the interim injunction application within 2 months. The matter then went to trial, which is now complete and should hopefully be argued before

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Managing IP brings India IP Focus 8th Edition

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The regular readers of Spicy IP may already be familiar with Managing IP, an organization providing global resources for IP news and analysis, whose IP webinars have often been announced and reported in the past in this blog (here, for example). One of the resource units in the Managing IP website concentrates exclusively on relevant and contemporary India-specific IP issues, titled India IP Focus. The latest edition of India IP focus, for example, brings for the readers a wonderful repository

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SpicyIP Tidbit: Indian generic companies now step into MPP

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Indian generics Aurobindo Pharma Limited and MedChem, yesterday joined the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) for the manufacture of several antiretroviral medicines. While Aurobindo is a well established generic unit which already produces antiretrovirals, MedChem is apparently a new comer into the HIV field. [The MPP is a patent pool which seeks to facilitate the innovation and production of ARVs in developing countries — we have written on it before here] This will allow Aurobindo to have access and produce the products that Gilead

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The absence of evidence in NATCO’s CL application for Nexavar

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There has been considerable world-wide interest over NATCO’s compulsory licensing application for Indian patent number 215758 i.e. Bayer’s patent for Sorafenib, which is marketed under the brand Nexavar. It’s the first such application post 2005 and is widely seen as the test case. Considering that the patent belongs to an American company it is likely that this issue will reverberate at the WTO. We had earlier blogged on this CL, over here and here. NATCO’s CL application is available over

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Examination of patent applications at the Indian patent office.

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Our patent office recently issued a circular relating to examination of patent applications and consideration of examiner’s report by the Controllers.  This circular provides an insight into the current process of examination of a patent application and also provides concrete steps to reduce the delay (at the patent office) in examination.  In my opinion, this is a very welcome step and long overdue.  PS:  We had, in one of our previous post provided suggestions for improving the working of the patent office

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Standard (US) for determining obviousness in chemical cases

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This post provides an overview of the Federal Circuit’s decision in Unigene Labs. and Upsher-Smith Labs v. Apotex (Fed. Cir. 2011) with respect to determination of an inventive step.  Long post follows. Summary: Unigene reflects the extent to which the Federal Circuit has evolved KSR v. Teleflex (KSR’s) obviousness jurisprudence.  Instead of following the KSR direction of ‘obvious to combine’, the Federal Circuit differentiated formulating known compounds with novel compounds and therefore pushes the boundaries of non-obviousness to new levels.  That said, this case

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Housing Finance Software Copyright Dispute

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This seems to be the season for disputes between competitors, with accusations of data theft and copyright infringement flying around from time to time. Soon after the Burrp-Zomato and Cleartrip-Travelocity disputes, we have another one to report, but this time in the context of housing finance software, with software firm Kensoft Infotech accusing Sundaram BNP Paribas Housing Finance (“Sundaram”) of fraudulent use, criminal breach of trust, hacking, reverse engineering and tampering of their software. In this instance, Kensoft Infotech had

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DIPP invites suggestions on reforming the Patents & Trademarks office

/ By / Trademark

The Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) has recently released a well-written, ‘discussion paper’ (available here), on the ‘Review of organizational structure of the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs, Trade Marks and Geographical Indications’. This ‘discussion paper’ seeks to examine the steps that can be taken to enhance the efficacy of the patents & trademark offices and going by the issues raised in the paper, it does appear that the DIPP is open to making some

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