At Old Seelampur, an impoverished neighbourhood in Northeast Delhi, rows of hollowed-out computer monitors line a dingy lane. On another street here, room after room on either side is piled high with dusty keyboards and metallic innards of computers and other electronic goods. Welcome to the wasteland of India’s urban refuse. Here, heaps of electronic waste — or e-waste as it is more commonly referred to — wait to be dismantled...

PROFESSOR Shamnad Basheer joined the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS), Kolkata, in November 2008 as the first Ministry of Human Resource Development Chaired Professor in Intellectual Property Law. Before this, he was Frank H. Marks Visiting Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the George Washington University law school and a research associate at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre (OIPRC).  He is the founder of several initiatives, including...

The implementation of Patents Act, as last amended in 2005, raises significant issues of immediate concern to patients across the world. INDIA'S Patents Act has an interesting history. Enacted first in 1911 as the Indian Patents and Designs Act in the colonial era, it primarily addressed the interests of inventors, who did not want their inventions infringed upon by anyone who copied them or adopted the methods used to make them....

-The Times of India   As consumers open up to digital products, their personal data is being valued more and more as an asset. Facebook's looming $100 billion valuation is based on a presumption of having personal information on millions of users, which can be used to target advertising and content towards them. And Google is moving to collect similar information. Globally, the power of data aggregators is raising serious concerns around...

-The Business Standard E-waste disposal cannot ignore the informal sector The deadline for the enforcement of new electronic waste (e-waste) management norms is just a month or so away. And yet, most of the sector’s stakeholders seem quite unprepared. The E-waste (Management and Handling) Rules, 2011, notified almost a year ago as coming into effect from May 1 this year, require producers of electronic and white goods to take back their products...