India is coming under increasing pressure from the U.S. and the European Union for the strict patentability criteria it applies for medicines. AS was only to be expected, the two landmark decisions made by the Indian patent office in recent times concerning pharmaceutical patent cases have not gone down well with the multinational drug industry. First, there was the rejection in 2006 of the patent application by the Swiss multinational...

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...

NOVARTIS has long been suing the Government of India to eliminate or weaken Section 3(d) of the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005, which established strict standards of patentability in order to prevent the ever-greening of patent monopolies on medicines. Although Novartis lost in 2007 its initial efforts to have Section 3(d) declared unconstitutional and violative of international norms for national patent regimes, it has persisted in appealing and re-appealing the denial...

The fear that “anyone can be arrested any day” brought some 2,000 teachers from campuses across Calcutta out on the road on Wednesday to protest the arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, the Jadavpur University professor who had been put behind bars for forwarding an Internet joke lampooning chief minister Mamata Banerjee. They walked from the central library of Jadavpur University to Triangular Park on Rashbehari Avenue. The rally, organised by the...

Advocate Harish Salve told a Supreme Court constitution bench, which is thinking of framing guidelines for the reporting of court cases, that it was within the court’s powers to define the extent of freedom of speech and expression when it came in conflict with the right to life. Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia asked Salve on Wednesday: “If not guidelines, then what do we call them?” “This is a declaration of the law,”...