India has seen a lot of chaos in the field of IP within the last decade. From amendments to draft amendments and propositions to impositions, IP in India has seen it all. In the past year alone we have witnessed 3 major amendments being proposed to the Patents Act and Rules and Trademark rules. Further, we have had several major discussions including discussions on the IPR policy for India, guidelines for examination of patents, software patents, etc.
The trend…
Well we’re all aware how heinous a crime piracy is and how every year the entertainment industry suffers a loss of millions of dollars due to it. For more than a decade anti-piracy organizations have been targeting pirate websites to curb instances of piracy. One such organization is BREIN (Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland, which roughly translates to association for the Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands), a Dutch organization which has been an active…
The timing of what has just happened in the world of patents cannot get better than this news. On the 1st of March 2016, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) published a discussion paper on standard essential patents (SEPs) and their availability on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The paper invites views from the concerned stakeholders regarding Standard Essential Patents and the issues surrounding them until the 31st of March, 2016.
In our previous post on SEPs,…
The Make in India program was launched by Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, in September 2014 as part of a wider set of nation-building initiatives. These initiatives were aimed at encouraging multi-national, as well as national companies to manufacture their products in India.
Last year in July, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) had come up with various strategies, keeping “Make in India” as the backdrop to encourage innovation and creativity, further boosting the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime. Some…
This post is in continuation to Standard Essential Patents : Fair? Reasonable? Non-Discriminatory? (I). In this post we will discuss the state of FRAND based litigation in other countries and look at how the Courts moved to interpret the law.
The first of the cases to be discussed are as follows:
Apple Inc. v. Motorola, Inc. and Motorola Mobility, Inc
Apple filed two complaints in the Western District of Wisconsin for patent infringement against Motorola, Inc. and Motorola Mobility, Inc., seeking…
Standard Setting Organizations (SSOs) set standards and essential features that must be fulfilled by specific essential items, materials, components, systems or services. Few examples of such SSOs in India are Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS), Telecom Standards Development Society of India (TSDSI), Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC), The Global ICT Standardization Forum for India (GISFI) and Development Organization of Standards for Telecommunications in India (DOSTI). When such specific essential item, material, component, system or service is in conformity with the set…
Last Wednesday, IP Kat had reported about an interesting opinion given by the Advocate General Szpunar in the case of Tobias Mc Fadden v Sony Music Entertainment Germany GmbH, C-484/14 which states that the Operator of a shop, hotel or bar who offers a password free Wi-Fi network are not liable for copyright infringement committed by users of that network.
In the instant case Tobias Mc Fadden operated a business of lights and sound systems near Munich that provides a…
Spoofs have had a long history of getting into trouble. So it’s no surprise that when brokerage giant TD Ameritrade tried to put a cheeky spin on the iconic line “Nobody puts Baby in the corner”, Lionsgate was not so forgiving. We had initially covered the matter , back in July, 2015 when Lionsgate filed an infringement suit against Ameritrade in Los Angeles.
Just to jog your memory and for our younger readers, who might not be familiar with the film…
The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the office for registering Trade Marks and Designs in the European Union, will undergo major changes including change in the name of the office to “European Union Intellectual Property Office” (EUIPO) and the name of the Community Trade Marks (CTM) to “European Union Trade Marks” (EUTM). The OHIM website, from 22nd to 23rd March 2016, will be updating its online application system to implement the changes in the legal process as…
Dr. Kalyan C. Kankanala, the founder of SiNApSE Blog, and a renowned IP Attorney and author, recently delivered a TEDX talk on 'What Motivates Inventors? Patents, or Passion? This is the first ever TED Talk on patents from India. You can view the talk on YouTube at this link.
In his talk, Dr. Kalyan talks about the role patents play in incentivizing inventors. He concludes that patents do not motivate inventors directly, but bring patrons in the form of investors.…