Intellectual Property Rights

DONALD Trump launched a new vaccine war this week, but not against the virus. It was against the world. The US and UK were only two hold-outs in the World Health Assembly on the declaration … Read more

Last month, the Indian Patents Office released the revised Guidelines for Computer Related Invention (CRI Guidelines), which has finally aligned the Patents Office fully with the Indian Patents Act. This is the third time that … Read more

A three-year old technology of gene editing called CRISPR is now the focus of two major disputes. The disputes are: who (or which team) will get the Nobel prize for this discovery, and the other, … Read more

Software patents are like zombies in the zombie film genre that Hollywood has made popular. They just refuse to die. As many time you kill them, they revive again and keep coming back. In India, … Read more

The government has chosen the occasion of Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the US to articulate a vision on Intellectual Property (IP) protection that promises to radically reshape the Indian IP system (as reported in … Read more

The US-India Joint Statement signed during Modi’s visit to the US has opened the doors for two Indian laws that have been passed by the Indian Parliament. One is on patents – the Indian Patents … Read more

AMONG all the provisions of the WTO agreement, the one relating to Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) has possibly been the most widely debated in the country. There are very good reasons why this … Read more

A few days back, the Health Minister of South Africa, Dr Motsoaledi, characterised an elaborate plot hatched by large multinational drug companies as “genocide” and a conspiracy of “satanic magnitude”. He was referring to public … Read more

TWO recent events show, once again, how the regulatory mechanisms that apply to medicines is deeply flawed and influenced by the industry. The first is the notification of ceiling prices for essential medicines by the … Read more

Angelina Jolie’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (May 14, 2013) stating why she had a double mastectomy (or breast removal) has created a media sensation across the world. Jolie is an icon and … Read more

The Supreme Court’s judgement throwing out Novartis’ attempts to secure a patent for the leukaemia drug Glivec has created a frenzy in the pink press – both in India and abroad. For them, one of … Read more

STRANGELY enough, the more lawyers a government has, the more poor are the draft laws it produces. Apart from the still continuing fiasco of the Lok Pal Bill, we have “The Protection and Utilisation of … Read more