Sound Board

Our thoughts and views on the practice of Intellectual Property in India and around the world.

There’s a rather common meme that was doing the rounds on social media which stated that “India is a country where we first become an “Engineer” and then think of what we really want to become” The number of people who identified with the statement was staggering and it’s not too hard to imagine. With medicine and engineering the top two things Indian parents want their kids to study (gotta be thankful to my folks who let me study law) it’s not hard to believe. The All India Council for…

As a software developer, there are a lot of things that need to be taken into consideration at the time of negotiation with the person engaging you to develop the software. It is very crucial to read the agreements that you might sign. On the other hand, as a person engaging a third party to develop software, you would always want exclusivity to the said software and accordingly, would like to include terms in a contract favouring that. So what happens when there a battle of ownership between…

The Delhi High Court recently granted an injunction against India Circus on a suit filed by Good Earth for passing-off of their designs, particularly for motifs, logos, patterns of Serai, Periyar, Vrindavan, Lotus, Bali Mynah, Rose Princess and Falcon on products. The Court has discussed passing-off in case of designs and also the concept of novelty (which hasn’t been discussed much) in terms of a design being old in itself but when applied to a new article to which it has never been previously…

Section 3(d) of the Indian Patent Act, 1970 has been under the gun ever since it was introduced to the Act through an amendment in 2005. Foreign pharmaceutical companies have time and again failed to establish that the letter of this provision violates the TRIPS, and have, recently, in an aggressive move, tried to attack its validity by stating that the spirit of the section is not in compliance with the TRIPS. This move, which could hamper India’s pharmaceutical Industry, was effected by the…

In my previous article, I’d written about how different aspects of the video game (story line, source code, characters, background music, screen shots, packaging) can be protected under the laws of copyright. In addition to this, there are different aspects of the trademark law that a game developer will have to keep in mind while creating a game is a world of unending possibilities.

I realised how there are so many myths that exist in the minds of people around us when I recently got into an argument with one of the people at my gym about music and licensing. So to give a little bit of a background, the lawyer in me urges me to go ask the shop owner/restaurant owner or any owner for that matter who play music in their premises, whether they have the license to do so. So I asked the manager at my gym whether or not they had obtained a license to play the music that they do.…