-The Hindu A more progressive Central law on land acquisition is now in place, but several States have already either amended the new law or enacted legislation of their own. On August 31, the Supreme Court in Kedar Nath Yadav v. State of West Bengal delivered one of the most momentous decisions of the year. It invalidated the expropriation of land in Singur by the erstwhile Left Front government in Bengal, and...

-Livemint.com Pulses are important from the perspectives of food security, environmental sustainability and balanced nutrition Most pulses such as pigeon pea (tur dal), black gram (urad), green gram (mung), field beans (waal), moth beans (matki) and horse gram (kulith) are native to the Indian subcontinent and have been an integral part of our diet for centuries. However, the single-minded focus on cereals over the last 50 years—the green revolution in wheat and...

-The Hindu While Monsanto and Indian seed companies spar, more worrying is the confused lawmaking underpinning regulation of patents Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) breed controversy like no other. Little wonder then that Monsanto’s much-maligned Bt cotton has spawned the mother of all intellectual property (IP) disputes in India, involving at least 15 different proceedings in various courts, government agencies and tribunals at last count. Most proceedings appear to have come at the behest...

-The Indian Express The clause lists cases where users are exempted from copyright infringement and includes teachers and students “in the course of the activities of an educational institution”. Copyright is not absolute and nor should it be, according to the Delhi High Court. Last week, the court ruled against five prominent academic publishing houses including Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor & Francis, allowing Rameshwari Photocopy Services (based in...

-The Hindu The Delhi High Court has restored to copyright jurisprudence a clear mandate for the future — one which recognises that the end goal of technology is the improvement of our lives In its much awaited judgment in the Delhi University photocopying case (The Chancellor Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Services), the Delhi High Court has dismissed the copyright infringement petition initiated in August 2012...