A rather ridiculous gap

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?

News Snippets

>> The Federal Court in Australia has said that musicians should be entitled to receive royalties when commercial radio streams music online.

Assange trademark

Julian Assange, who shot to global fame after publishing colossal amounts of classified-yet-humdrum US government data, has applied for a UK trademark on his own name.

Unholy smoke!

Most readers might find it difficult to credit what follows. This is a story of how bilateral and multilateral investment treaties are being used to satisfy corporate greed, how large corporations, even those in the unsavoury business of selling cigarettes, can sue countries for passing public health laws intended to protect their citizenry from health hazards and killer diseases.

Acta is trade terrorism

It is now final. Two weeks ago, the final text of the Anti- Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a plurilateral pact ostensibly aimed at stamping out the trade in counterfeit goods, was put out by the cabal of countries that have been negotiating it in secret for the past three years. It was only in April this year that the world got to see the contours of this deliberately deceptive measure when an earlier draft of the agreement was leaked on the Web.

Trademark protest

International environmental NGO, Greenpeace, is in the copyright soup over its campaign to save Olive Ridley Turtles.

The irrelevance of multilateralism

WHAT RICH COUNTRIES SAY AND WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DO is worlds apart. At the just concluded round of discussions on ACTA, the controversial Anti- Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, in Lucerne in Switzerland, the countries trying to steamroller a plurilateral pact to tighten enforcement of global intellectual property (IP) rules made some rather incongruous promises.

Kremlin on Tartar sweet

Abakery in the Russian autonomous republic of Tatarstan has signed a unique agreement with the region’s government. It can now use the picture of the republic’s seat of government, Kazan Kremlin, on its products.

Coorg cardamom gets GI status

Producers get a boost coorg green cardamom, grown in southwest Karnataka, has received the geographical area indicator or GI status. This means only cardamom grown in Kodagu--formerly Coorg--can be marketed as Coorg cardamom. The Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trademarks, under the commerce ministry, granted the gi status

The first punch

"David didn't beat Goliath by waiting till Goliath threw the first punch," US blogger Mike Morgan writes on his site. For a reason: on April 13, Morgan took Goldman Sachs to court to prevent the big investment bank from taking his domain names. He hopes to protect anti-Goldman websites, including www.goldmansachs666.com and www.goldmansachs13.com, from trademark action threatened by the powerful bank.