A press release issued by IPXI, Intellectual Property Exchange International, Inc., the world's first financial exchange for licensing and trading intellectual property rights, brought to our attention, the eight month long review of IPXI conducted by the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. After the completion of the review, the DoJ has, according to the press release, issued its BRL (Business Review Letter) which apparently is in favour of the IPXI Licensing Model. IPXI, is an exchange that has...
Sunday, March 31, 2013
Saturday, March 30, 2013
The Competition Commission of India (CCI), in an order dated March 5, 2013 has dismissed, at the threshold stage, a complaint filed by a public health (HIV) activist against Gilead Inc. alleging that the company was engaged in anti-competitive activities with respect to licensing of its technologies relating to anti-HIV drugs. The activist was represented by Advocates Ms. Savita Singh, Ms. Veena Johari and Ms. Kajal Bhardwaj. The order can be accessed...
Image from hereThe Bombay High Court (see here for order) has restrained the release of any trailers or teasers of the remake Zanjeer/ Thoofan (the Telugu version of the film), until the final judgment on this matter is pronounced. The remade ‘Zanjeer’ has run into hot water, not only is it involved in a copyright dispute (see here) but also involved in a controversy regarding non-payment of dues for the film’s remake rights. Sumeet...
Friday, March 29, 2013
Images from here and hereA local Court in Gurgaon granted an ex-parte interim injunction against Viacom 18 Pvt Ltd., restraining them from using the trademark ‘Nautanki’ and the accompanying logo last week, as reported here. The Great Indian Nautanki Company Private Limited (GINC), which runs the hugely popular entertainment project 'Kingdom Of Dreams' in Gurgaon had filed a lawsuit against Viacom for infringing their trademark ‘Nautanki’....
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Image from hereThe case (here) in the following post is the first of its kind and an interesting one. It deals with matters related to the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act, 2001. Preliminary observation Before going into the facts of the case, the court pointed to a major lapse on the part of the Government in relation to its inaction in implementing various provisions of the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers...
Image from hereIn a move that is surely going to open a hornet’s nest soon in the future, Ericsson, the Swedish giant in mobile network infrastructure manufacturing, has recently filed a patent infringement suit against Micromax, one of India’s largest domestic mobile handset manufacturers (producing approximately 5.5% of the 200 million mobile handsets sold annually in India). The suit, filed at the Delhi High Court, involves a huge claim of Rs....
Image from hereA reference (order available here) was made to a Full Bench of the Delhi High Court to consider as to what amounts to ‘prior publication’ under the Design Act, 2000. Previously, mere publication of a design by a foreign patent office was held not to constitute prior publication (Dabour Ltd. v Amit Jain (Del HC) and Gopal Glass Works v Asst. Contoller of Patents and Designs (Cal HC)). However, this ratio was questioned as it seemed...
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard arguments on the legality of reverse payment settlements in the pharmaceutical sector, where a patent holder would pay a generic pharmaceutical manufacturer to delay or withdraw any challenges to patent validity. Given the increasing number of reverse payment settlements, the final holding of the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have a significant impact on competition in the pharmaceutical industry. We have for our readers a guest post on this topic and the hearing before the Supreme Court, by Mr. George...
Image from here.The Patent Office has published the final version of the “Guidelines for Examination of Biotechnology Applications for Patents”, accessible over here, dated March 25, 2013. The draft version of these guidelines was published initially in December, 2012 and made available for public comment on the Patent Office website. The public comments received by the Patent Office, most of which were negative, were published on the patent office...
Monday, March 25, 2013
A public notice issued 5 days ago by the Office of The Controller General Patents, Designs& Trade Marks has brought forth quite a wonderful initiative. It provides for the establishment of joint committees consisting of members from Trademark stakeholders and some officers of the Trademark Registry. (henceforth TMR) This initiative has been suggested as a mechanism to find constructive solutions for the various problems that arise with respect to trademark matters as well as to ensure better coordination between the TMR and the trademark...
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Image from hereThis week has been quite exciting and action packed with SpicyIP covering various recent legal developments – cases, Copyright Rules, 2013 and other important legal issues. Copyright Rules, 2013 The week started off with news regarding notification of the Copyright Rules, 2013 (Anubha’s post here). The new rules (available here) are pursuant to the recent Copyright Amendment Act, 2012. Prashant in his post (here) highlighted...
Friday, March 22, 2013
In an earlier post, we'd reported a constitutionality challenge that had been filed against the recent copyright amendments. Well, it turns out that the constitutionality challenge was filed by 3 different parties. 1. T series and Venus filed two separate petitions challenging the constitutionality of the statutory licensing scheme under the amended Section 31(1)(b) and 31(D). They had initially filed the writ in the Supreme Court under Article 32, but were asked by the court to file instead in the High Court under Article 226. This was...
Recently, Dr. S. Jagathrakshakan, Minister of State for Commerce & Industry filed a written reply which contained statistics of applicants filed for patents and the patents that were actually granted in India. This was released by the Press Information Bureau and was brought to our knowledge by a friend and well wisher of SpicyIP , Mr. Shiwprasad Wanve.The PIB release tabulates the patent applications filed in medicines by Indian legal entities including companies, Research and Development Institutions & Academic Institutions...
Thursday, March 21, 2013
As expected, India's revolutionary copyright amendments seeking to foster social justice by providing mandatory royalty payments to music composers and lyricists has been challenged as unconstitutional. (For those interested, a text of the amendment is available here). A writ petition was first filed before the Supreme Court of India sometime last week by leading music labels, T Series and Venus Records, challenging interalia sections 17,18, 19,...
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
While the Copyright Office has made a few amendments, to the draft version of the Copyright Rules, 2012 governing the Copyright Board, the amendments in the final notified version fail to go far enough. (Our previous post can be accessed over here) Let’s start with the good news first. Good-news: The...
Thanks to PRS Legislative Research, a clean copy of the latest Copyright Rules, 2013 as appeared on the Official Gazzette is available here. As we noted earlier, the notification of the rules came out on March 14, 2013. The rules were enacted pursuant to the Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012 notified on June 21, 20...
The hugely popular and critically acclaimed TV series 'Mad Men' has faced a setback after its production company Lionsgate has been sued by Gita Hall May, a top 1950's model. The lawsuit has been filed by Ms. May in the Superior Court of the State of California for the county of Los Angeles. The main title sequence of the Mad Men series depicts the shadow of a businessman falling through Madison Avenue. The background uses advertisements,...
In this post, we would like to clarify one of our earlier posts that we had published on Monday regarding the Fox-‘Knockout’ copyright dispute. In the earlier post we had reported, on the basis of a NDTV/Mid-Day report that Fox had won a copyright infringement claim against the Indian producers of the movie ‘Knockout’ for allegedly infringing Fox’s copyright in the script for the movie ‘Phone-Booth’. The report had also mentioned that Fox was awarded...
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