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Patently Absurd
US pharma strikes back
@Lathajishnu Issue Date: Jun 30, 2013
That outsourcing to India has taken away precious US jobs is a familiar whine. It usually comes from American politicians playing to their galleries whenever it is expedient. Over the past decade and more the ranting and raving about Americans losing jobs to Indians have risen in register whenever the number of H-1B visas that are doled out to techies is under negotiation.
A myriad gene worries
Issue Date: Jun 15, 2013
Till the famously gorgeous Angelina Jolie startled the world two weeks ago by disclosing that she had had both her breasts removed owing to concerns about a genetic predisposition to breast cancer, few people here would have paid attention to a momentous case on gene patenting in the US.
A rather ridiculous gap
Issue Date: May 31, 2013
Trademark disputes are the humdrum of intellectual property (IP) litigation. Important, no doubt, for the parties involved but hardly the stuff to get you and me excited. What all we have missed in recent times?
India’s 3 D Message
Issue Date: Apr 30, 2013
It is a lawsuit that caught the attention of the world and generated enough commentary to have decimated a forest if all of it had been on paper.
The Microsoft way
Issue Date: Apr 15, 2013
A favourite Bill Gates story is this. In 1998, the boss of Microsoft was talking to management students at the University of Washington to share his business philosophy. Here’s what he said then about piracy: “Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software,” he said. “Someday they will, though.
Why scientists don’t back Novartis claim
Issue Date: Mar 31, 2013
The past two weeks have been marked by significant decisions on lawsuits that have put India’s patent regulations to the test. The case in the headlines has been one related to Natco’s compulsory licence for the manufacture of German drug giant Bayer’s cancer treatment drug Nexavar.
Testing the CL route
Issue Date: Mar 15, 2013
Last month I ran into Ecuador’s popular president Rafael Correa as he was campaigning for a third term—he has since been re-elected with a record majority—and recalled his path-breaking decision to issue compulsory licences (CLs) to ensure cheaper medicines for his expanding public health programme. The decree, the first such in Latin America, was issued in October 2009 for some much-needed drugs and, six months later, the Ecuadorian government handed out the first CL on US multinational Abbott’s ritonavir, an AIDS medication.
Menacing US diplomacy
Issue Date: Jan 31, 2013
There is something that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has in common with US diplomats—or at least the intellectual property (IP) attachés posted at various diplomatic missions: a dislike of NGOs.
Indications of a geographic muddle
Issue Date: Dec 31, 2012
People of Hoovina Hadagali (population: 27,958), the taluka headquarters of Bellary district of Karnataka, are inordinately proud of their variety of mallige (jasmine). So are the growers of Udipi and Mysore, all of them claiming unique and distinctive features for their varieties of these sweet-smelling flowers which are offered to temple deities or used by south Indian women to adorn their hair.
A patent triumph of public interest
Issue Date: Dec 15, 2012
Fresh winds are wafting changes in the stuffy world of pharmaceutical patents. Countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America—there are not too many just now—are enshrining flexibilities in their patent laws to ensure that public interest remains in the legal framework of the patent regime.
