Our Highlight of the Week for the last week is, quite definitely, Prashant Reddy’s excellent, detailed post reflecting on the Delhi High Court’s Justice Manmohan Singh’s major decisions and IP jurisprudence, and on the question of the criteria of appointments to the post of the Chairman of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board. His post comes in the context of reports that Justice Singh might be tapped for the post.
Our first post this week was Prateek’s commentary on the recent chaos in thousands of applications used across the internet due to the deletion of one, single piece of open source code, ‘left pad’. He discusses the technicalities involved, and then moves on to a discussion of the legal issues that arose in this case.
Up next was Aparajita, with an analysis of the Supreme Court’s recent judgment on the validity of criminal defamation. She comments on the unnecessary verbosity, length and breadth of the judgment, including its creation of a new fundamental right, the right to reputation.
Our next post this week was by Ritvik, looking into the affordability of Hepatitis C drugs. He starts off by discussing a recent WHO-led study which revealed major disparities in the pricing of Hepatitis c drugs, in some countries even going up to the equivalent of at least a year’s average income. He discusses the comparatively affordable cost of the same drug in India, specifically, and the cost paid for the same by other countries.
Inika followed this up with an insightful post bringing us an update on the long series of patent litigations that Apple faces and/or has started, with Caltech now joining the fray and suing Apple, and Broadcom, for a violation of four of its patents.
Prof. Shamnad then revisited the ‘National IPR policy’, sharing his second piece on the topic, along with three pieces by Dr. Majeed, KM Gopakumar, and Prof. Srividhya Ragavan respectively. He compares the policy, in his post, to Hans Christian Anderson’s classic tale of the ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, where a vain emperor and his courtiers are conned by two treacherous tailors into believing that a non-existent suit was invisible to them because it was made of a fabric was so fine, those unfit of office would never see it.
Up next was Rahul, with his post bringing us up to date with the Government’s recent guidelines on the licensing of GM technology on FRAND terms, and the Government’s withdrawal of the same.
Our penultimate post this week was Vasundhara’s post analysing recent developments on plain packaging law in India, including a PIL that has been filed on the issue in the Supreme Court. She discusses the relevant Indian legislations on the topic, the international developments on the issue, and the future and potential benefits, or otherwise, of plain packing for us.
Finally, we concluded this week with Shruthi announcing the Institute of Intellectual Property Research and Development’s (‘IIPRD’) International Patent Drafting Competition (IPDC) 2016, to be held soon, with a discount for SpicyIP readers.
International Developments
- Colombia plans to unilaterally lower the cost of a Novartis cancer drug.
- Gilead slam dunks Merck in US Federal Court ruling, because Merck lawyer ‘lied’.
- Doctors Without Borders to India: Protect the ‘pharmacy of the developing world’.
- The CJEU stated in a ruling that fair compensation for private copying cannot be funded through the general state budget.
- BEREC published its Consultation on Net Neutrality.