The story of how IPRS took both, the Civil Judge, Barasat & the Registrar of Copyrights for a ride.

/ By / Copyright

As discussed in an earlier post of mine, over here, the Registrar of Copyrights had launched an inquiry into the internal functioning of IPRS and had in fact asked a very, very detailed set of questions on the management of IPRS. This inquiry was frustrated when IPRS sent the Registrar of Copyright a letter informing him that it had been sued by Saregama before the Civil Court in November, 2009 at Barasat and that the Court had ordered a ‘status […]

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SpicyIP Events: IAN Incubator Workshop on "International Patenting Strategies" in Bengaluru

/ By / Patent

From the folks at IAN Incubator, we have another interesting workshop scheduled for those of you in Bengaluru (oh how I hate that version of the city’s name!). You will recall a previous IP workshop that they had organised in Delhi some time ago, which we had posted on here. This is an ongoing series of workshops for entrepreneurs across different cities to educate aspiring entrepreneurs and start-ups on challenges faced by them and help them in tackling these challenges

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The story of the litigation leading up to the ‘Special Resolution’ which curbed the rights of authors and composers

/ By / Copyright

This is the story of how the big music companies tried every trick in the book to keep postponing IPRS’s Annual General Meeting for 4 years after which they finally managed to amend the bye-laws of IPRS, in January 2008, in such a manner that they were in complete control of IPRS after ensuring that composers and lyricists would always be in a minority on the Board of Directors. (i) The strategy to cancel the AGMs in 2004, 05 &

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The story of how ‘Big Music Companies’ slowly but surely took over control of IPRS

/ By / Uncategorized

Although the full form of IPRS is Indian Performing Rights Society, it is actually a company incorporated under the Companies Act, 1956 and is limited by guarantee and not shares. Basically each member has to guarantee a liability of Rs. 100 if in case things get bad. As with any other company IPRS is governed by Article of Association (AoA) and Memorandum of Association (MoA). The Memorandum lays out the basic aims of the company, while the Articles lay out

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Did the big music companies on IPRS & PPL collude to deny lyricists and composers crores of rupees in ‘ringtone royalties’ – An investigation

/ By / Copyright

This is the first in a series of post on the state of affairs at the Indian Performing Rights Society Ltd. (IPRS). Pursuant to our last few posts on IPRS and Phonographic Performance Ltd., available over here and here, I’ve spent several more fascinating hours, over the last three days, poring over documents that were obtained from the Copyright Office, under the RTI Act and downloaded from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs website. The results of this amateur investigation, carried

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Did the Registrar of Trade Marks have the jurisdiction to revoke the ‘MANJAL’ trademark?

/ By / Trademark

Pursuant to Mathews excellent post on the removal of the ‘Manjal’ trademark, I was discussing the case with him and we decided that one of the points, i.e. the jurisdiction issue merits a more detailed discussion. The Order of the Registrar notes that the Registered Proprietor of the ‘Manjal’ Trademark had contested the jurisdiction of the Registrar to hear the matter, on the grounds stated in Section 125 of the Trade Marks Act, 1999. The gist of Section 125 is

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SpicyIP Tidbit: Medicines Patent Pool in talks with Big Pharma

/ By / Patent

UNITAID’s Medicines Patent Pool which received it’s first patent late last year is now making more headway by entering into negotiations with several key HIV medicines patent holders. Patent pools work by allowing patent holders to share their IP with other parties via licences. The working of this patent pool in particular therefore relied on the key patent holders contributing their patents to the pool for it work. To the skeptics (me included) of how well this would work, there is

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Submissions invited for USTR’s 2011 Special 301 report

/ By / Uncategorized

The annual Special 301 report is something we’ve covered a bit in the past, and the 2011 edition will be coming out soon. The USTR is requesting comments and submissions to be made for the 2011 edition for the public hearing on March 2nd. The deadline for submitting these is February 15th. For those who don’t know about USTR’s Special 301 Report, it is a unilateral measure taken by the USTR which essentially ranks countries according to how much the

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Wikileaks on ACTA’s development

/ By / Uncategorized

Wikileaks: Giving a helping handImage from here Wikileaks, which first brought our attention to the ACTA back in mid 2008, has now brought attention to the history of how the ACTA came about. Expectedly, it shows that there had been explicit communication regarding the eventual imposition of TRIPS plus standards on developing countries. Somewhat surprisingly however, it appears that the EU behaved as rather weak negotiating party and were not completely happy with how the events unfolded. La Quadrature du Net  has come out

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Outsourcing Indian Patent Searches to CSIR: Insourcing Conflict?

/ By / Uncategorized

As many of you in the patent line may have heard, the Indian Patent Office has begun to outsource its prior art searches to CSIR, India’s largest public funded patentee. As expected, the move comes with its fair share of controversy. Is there a conflict? Will the walls of our esteemed neighbours help quell the possibility that CSIR acts in a biased manner against its competitors, existing or potential? Could CSIR take the plea that it anyway acts in national

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