That this is the first time a compulsory licence has been granted in India is in itself important. INDIA'S long struggle to ensure access to affordable medicines for its people recently took a positive and interesting turn. In early March, just before he demitted office, Controller General of Patents P.H. Kurian passed an order on an application filed by Natco Pharma, headquartered in Hyderabad, requesting a licence to produce an anti-cancer...
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A welcome first -TK Rajalakshmi
Industry reacts with caution to the grant of a compulsory licence to Natco, but cancer patients welcome it and hope for many more. THE first compulsory licence (CL) issued by the Indian patent office, to the local drug manufacturer Natco Pharma Ltd to sell the generic version of Bayer AG's anti-cancer drug Nexavar, has led to varied reactions. The landmark decision has also raised concerns about the outcome of cases...
More »SC can define freedom of speech extent: Salve-Nikhil Kanekal
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,”...
More »RTI activists say politicians using RTI queries to spy on them
-Mid-Day.com Politicians are not known to be fans of the Right to Information Act, but now they seem to have discovered that they can use the same law to obtain details on RTI activists' work, allegedly in order to know which activist they need to harass to prevent the next big expose. RTI activists claim that political leaders are making their proxies use the sunshine law to know what information the activists...
More »The IT Act's hammer
-The Business Standard Kolkata arrest shows the IT Act is too easily misused The recent arrest of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University, for emailing a comic strip lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, highlighted glaring flaws in the laws that made the arrest possible — the Information Technology (IT) Act, its amendments, and the Rules framed for its implementation. The strip was an innocuous mash-up that combined stock...
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