intellectual property rights

Approximately 35,000 patent applications (those with a validity of 20 years from their filing date, once granted) were filed at the Indian Patent Office (IPO) during the 2007-08 fiscal year, which indicates a 21 percent growth over the previous year. In contrast, the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) received a total of 245,161 20-year patent applications in 2007. This made China ..

Wi-LAN Inc. is suing Motorola, Research in Motion and UTStarCom for alleged infringement of the Ottawa patent-licensing company's intellectual property. The company announced Friday it had filed the suit in a Texas court that is a favourite of patent-licence companies seeking big judgments. In October, Wi-LAN used the same court to file an omnibus suit against 22 other major companies for..

A new competition law passed in 2002, further amended in 2007, will be operational soon. One of its active agenda will be to curb abusive monopolistic practices by businesses Contestability of markets is the adrenaline of all economies. While countries liberalise their economies, an extremely vital concomitant reform is the enactment and implementation of appropriate competition laws so that cons..

In one of the landmark judgments on patents which would benefit HIV patients, Indian Patent Office on Thursday rejected a patent application filed by multinational pharma company Boehringer Ingelheim on paediatric form of anti-AIDS drug nevirapine. The company was trying to claim a patent on the syrup form of nevirapine, which is particularly important for children living with HIV who are unab..

Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal has said India's emerging intellectual property regime will not only uphold the interests of pharmaceutical companies but shall also match their investment on a 50:50 basis to develop collaborative initiatives to mutual benefits in the field of agriculture, marine and health sciences. Addressing the Indo-US BioPharma Summit 2008, organised by the US-..

The German sportwear maker Adidas has launched legal proceedings against the world's biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, charging that it copied some of Adidas' products, a company spokeswoman said. The second-biggest global sportswear group after Nike, Adidas filed a motion with a court in the US state of Oregon, home to its US headquarters, charging that Wal-Mart copied models of Adidas footwear, ..

Out-of-court settlements are increasingly the order of the day with pharma companies, and yet, Ranbaxy’s settlement with Pfizer on its estimated $13-billion cholesterol drug is a global show stopper. Over the last couple of years, more innovative drug companies are forging settlements with companies making generic versions of their drugs, observes a pharma analyst. And that is because legal co..

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which have taken big strides in developing new products, can look forward to central assistance in securing intellectual property rights. The prospect of getting assistance is looking up with the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) ministry offering a Rs 55-crore IPR-facilitation package for implementation over the next four years. For 2008-09, Rs 8..

Kerala Government on Saturday approved a state-specific Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policy seeking to protect traditional knowledge and inventions. Disclosing this after a Cabinet meeting, Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan claimed that Kerala was the first state in the country to bring out such a policy. The crux of the policy was to protect and preserve the intellectual properties o..

The weavers of Gopalpur in Jajpur district have demanded patentry of their handloom products, made of tussar fabric. At a workshop, jointly organized by the Institute of Socio-Economic Research and Training, Indian Merchants’ chamber, UNCTAD and the Union ministry of commerce & industry on “Strategies and preparedness for the trade and globalisation in the textile sector” the participants deman..

Apart from a five per cent share of the Indian pharmaceutical market, the purchase of Ranbaxy will take Daiichi Sankyo way ahead of others in the race among Indian companies for patent-protected drugs. A recent paper on ‘Patenting Landscape in India' by Evalueserve shows that Ranbaxy alone accounts for over 23 per cent of the total medicine patent applications filed by major domestic companies ..

Abraxis BioScience, Inc. (NASDAQ:ABII), a fully integrated, global biotechnology company, today announced that it intends to appeal the jury ruling in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware that Abraxis has infringed upon a patent owned by Elan. In the suit, Elan claimed that Abraxis infringed upon two of Elan's patents, 5,834,025 and 5,399,363, asserting ABRAXANE(R: 68.53, +1.40, +2..

Red Hat (News - Alert), a provider of open source solutions, has announced the settlement of patent litigation brought against it by Firestar Software and DataTern. Calling this settlement an “important precedent” in the breadth of protection for the open source community, Raleigh-based Red Hat said the settlement will protect Red Hat's customers and the open source community from similar suits..

The Delhi High Court recently issued a notice to Yahoo Inc. and its Indian subsidiary Yahoo Web Services (India) Pvt. Ltd on a suit filed by Super Cassettes Industries Limited (SCIL) owner of the music label T-Series for infringement of their copyright caused by unlicensed streaming of SCIL’s works on Yahoo’s portal www.video.yahoo.com. Early this year a number of music videos whose copyright ..

Justice Rajagopala Ayyangar’s bold patent law reforms, suggested way back in 1959, which catalysed the Patents Act, 1970, stand vindicated now. The biggest tribute to his genius has come from an unlikely source: Daiichi Sankyo Co. Ltd, a Tokyo-based company that is acquiring a majority stake in India’s largest pharmaceutical company, Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. With this milestone, the Indian intell..