-Vikalp Once again, India is under pressure from the US to revise its patent law. Anyone familiar with the activities of the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) would know that this is nothing new. It has been among the USTR's primary mandates to use trade restrictions in order to persuade (to put it mildly) countries to strengthen their IPR laws. There is, however, a qualitative difference between the actions it has...
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Who owns our genetic wealth? -Suman Sahai
-The Asian Age There was a news report not so long ago that ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), an international organisation and part of the CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) consortium, had entered into an agreement with Gubba Cold Storage Ltd. to set up a private seed bank, the first of its kind in India. No details were available of the terms and conditions under...
More »Generic drug makers get a boost from SC ruling -Ramnath Subbu
-The Hindu In a significant development for the pharmaceutical industry, the Supreme Court has rejected multinational Bayer's appeal to block production and sales of the low cost version of its kidney cancer drug, sorafenib tosylate (branded as Nexavar), by Natco Pharmaceuticals. Hyderabad-based Natco was granted the first and to date only compulsory licence (CL) by the government in 2012 to make and sell a patented drug at a fraction of the...
More »Rethinking IP think tank -Latha Jishnu
-Down to Earth Government sidelines its committee of experts to set up new panel to review India's intellectual property rights policy The politics of protecting intellectual property rights (IPR) is becoming more curiouswith the commerce ministry setting up a think tank to draft a national IPR policy while sidelining a committee of experts it had set up earlier. Annoyed academics who were asked to help formulate the policy in July this year...
More »Disaster in progress -Indira Jaising
-The Indian Express On the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, memories of the victims' suffering surface once again. One is at a loss for words to describe what happened on the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984. Was it an accident? Or was it industrial genocide? We will never know what it was, since no investigation was conducted on what caused water to leak into 41 tonnes of higly toxic...
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