-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 Preventive detention is being routinised as an instrument of state repression The recent preventive detention (PD) of Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri human rights activist, and Jignesh Mewani, a Dalit leader from Gujarat, has turned the spotlight on the provision of PD and the purposes it is being made to serve. National Crime Records Bureau data released in September 2015 indicate that over 3,200 people were being held in administrative...

-Scroll.in By March 2017, Aadhaar will be mandatory for food benefits even as fingerprint authentication problems persist, and rules on grievance redress are missing The National Democratic Alliance government has asked the states and Central ministries to link the details of all beneficiaries of its social welfare schemes with Aadhaar, a biometric-based unique identity number, by March 2017. On September 14, the Unique Identity Authority of India – the agency that manages the...

-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 Times of India NEW DELHI: The use of Aadhaar card is set to become mandatory for all central and state government subsidies and benefits which require funding from the central exchequer with the Centre notifying the unique identity (UID) regulations. While the law had empowered the Centre to mandate use of Aadhaar, the rules clearly stipulate that any agency, such as the oil ministry dealing with cooking gas or HRD's scholarship...