Sound Board

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

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.…

Nowadays, the Internet has become the most popular medium for commercial organisations to promote themselves. This is because the internet has no boundaries or closing hours. Every person who wishes to use the internet as a medium needs a domain name. A domain name is nothing but a network address that helps identify a particular entity on the internet. Usually, a domain name consists of two parts – the top level domain (TLD), which is used to identify the organisation that owns it or the…

Before I start off telling the world the numerous ways in which different parts of a video games can be protected as an intellectual property, I must admit that I don’t play video games myself and all my knowledge about it is limited to all that I hear about it from friends and colleagues. Though video games have never really fascinated me, when I started reading and knowing more about them (purely for research!), it’s definitely something I wanted to try my hand at!

The Make in India logo with the symbol of a lion with the cogs, was reportedly designed by the Indian subsidiary of a US Agency Weidon+Kennedy (W+K) [Anyone else see the irony] seemed very fancy and innovative until thenewsminute.com reported that there was an uncanny resemblance between the Make in India logo and the logo of the sponsored campaign of the Cantonal Bank of Zurich in Switzerland.

Intellectual property laws provide protection for some works under both copyright and design law. At the face of it, the law on this point seems rather clear. However, interpretation of Section 15 of the Copyright Act in conjunction with the definition of “Design” under the Design Act makes it slightly tricky. A recent case decided by the Delhi High Court has tried to differentiate between a copyright and a design on the basis of the nature of the work and its industrial application. The Judge…