Guest Post by Latha Nair on the GI Controversy Surrounding "Pashmina"

/ By / Uncategorized

SpicyIP is pleased to bring you a guest post from a very renowned intellectual property practioner from India, Latha R Nair. She has a number of distinctions to her credit, but we list a few of them below: “She is a partner with the Delhi based law firm K&S Partners, one of the top IP firms in India. She received her Honors degree in Bachelor of Arts and Law from the National Law School of India University at Bangalore in […]

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Is the Indian Drug Controller Participating in the ACTA Negotiations?

/ By / Drug Regulation

Pursuant to our post lamenting the “secrecy” with which the ACTA (Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) negotiations were shrouded, an anonymous source writes to inform us thus: “I am afraid that the new Indian Drugs Controller General is being briefed about the Treaty , its objectives etc as he has been (unlike any before him) invited to Canada and USA. The Indian Govt has become too inward- concerned to worry about these “conspiracies” concerning IP treaties from the West!” SpicyIP hasn’t

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A round of bio-piracy for all.

/ By / Biological Diversity

Latha Jishnu’s article in the Business Standard brings to our attention that the problem of bio-piracy is ubiquitous and cannot be said to be one afflicting developing countries alone. She writes about the story of “Taqs” or Thermus Aquaticus a bacterium isolated by two scientists in 1966. Twenty years Kary Mullis a researcher for the Cetus Corporation went on to take an enzyme from Taqs and derive from it the Nobel Prize winning process called the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)

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SpicyIP tidbit: Weavers getting ‘G.I ‘savvy

/ By / Uncategorized

Indicative of the growing awareness amidst the stakeholders of their respective IPR rights,the weavers of Gopalpur are seeking protection for the Tussar weave. The Statesmen whilst promptly reporting on the proactive initiatives of the weavers, nevertheless continue to with the ‘conflation’ saga. (We at SpicyIP did our best to correct the erroneous usage of terms during the yoga controversy) ‘The weavers of Gopalpur in Jajpur district have demanded patentry of their handloom products, made of tussar fabric.At a workshop, jointly

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Opposing Lack of Transparency in IP: KEI and Michael Geist on the ACTA

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Readers will recollect a post by Swaraj Barooah on the controversial anti counterfeiting treaty. SpicyIP is vehemently opposed to any move that flouts principles of transparency in such a heinous manner. This treaty is being negotiated behind closed doors by a handful of trade representatives from the US, EU etc. It has no developing country representation and a recent post by the famous Canadian cyberlaw academic and activist, Micheal Geist suggests that the negotiators are bound by a non-disclosure obligation–for

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Digital manners, and the future of governance

/ By / Innovation, Patent

NB: The following post is not immediately related to Indian policy, but is a more general discussion picking up from a recent patent application on a possible scenario for future governance. After the OOXML saga (of which there is a lot more to come, I am sure), Microsoft is in the news again – this time for a patent on digital manners. The USPTO application for a Device Manners Policy (DMP) is available here: “The present invention includes methods and

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SpicyIP Accolades: A Big Thank You to Our Readers

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We’d celebrated the month of May for having given us 3 IP decisions from the Supreme Court of India. For our previous posts on these decisions, please see here, here and here.SpicyIP listed in Lexis Nexis, Library of Congress and MIP It turns out that May has proved a good month for SpicyIP on other counts as well. We have been selected as a top IP blog by Lexis Nexis in every category of IP i.e. patent, copyrights and trademarks.

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The OOXML standard: a paper tiger?

/ By / Innovation

The standards debate over the preferred international document format has been ongoing for months now. The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) has officially put on hold the certification of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML), after registering appeals from India, Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela, received some days ago against the March 2008 ratification. (Read the official press release here) Were the OOXML to be approved, it would override the pre-existing ISO standard of the open-source Open Document Format (ODF), which

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Clandestine IP treaty being drafted

/ By / Uncategorized

Continuing from my previous post, it seems that certain developed countries have decided to take matters into their own hands. A controversial treaty is being drafted in secret by a group of wealthy countries. Late 2007 saw the beginning of this effort at creating new global standards for intellectual property rights spearheaded by United States, the European Commission, Japan, and Switzerland. Cleverly named the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (Note: it does not deal with money counterfeiting), the drafting committee quite noticeably

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Patent Litigation in the Himachal Pradesh High Court

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Shamnad recently forwarded me a judgment of the Himachal Pradesh High Court passed in a case regarding the validity of a patent. I’m pleased to inform our readers that, although this is probably one of the first such patent cases in the HPHC, the Division Bench consisting of Justice Gupta & Justice Ahuja have done quite a good job with the judgment. Although the judgment is not extensively researched it has no major conceptual errors, it is quite lucid, it

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