From chansoobak at yahoo.com Mon Apr 2 17:01:05 2007 From: chansoobak at yahoo.com (chan park) Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2007 04:31:05 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update, 2.4.07 Message-ID: <155280.2058.qm@web37713.mail.mud.yahoo.com> The Novartis matter did not resume today due to a boycott by the Madras Bar Association protesting the recent order of the Supreme Court of India relating to reservations for Other Backward Classes. The matter has been posted for tomorrow. We will continue our updates then. In solidarity, Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit Anand Chan Julie Prathibha All prior updates and related documents can be found at our website, www.lawyerscollective.org/ --------------------------------- It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070402/d7e85b8e/attachment.html From chansoobak at yahoo.com Tue Apr 3 13:55:12 2007 From: chansoobak at yahoo.com (chan park) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 01:25:12 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update 3.4.07 Message-ID: <677745.85526.qm@web37714.mail.mud.yahoo.com> The Indian Government issued a notification yesterday declaring that the provision in the Patents (Amendment) Act (section 117G), that provides that all pending appeals in the High Court shall be transferred to the Appellate Board set up under the Act, shall be made effective as of 2 April 2007. The text of section 117G states: "All cases of appeals against any order or decision of the Controller and all cases pertaining to revocation of patent other than on a counter-claim in a suit for infringement and rectification of register pending before any High Court, shall be transferred to the Appellate Board from such date as may be notified by the Central Government in the Official Gazette and the Appellate Board may proceed with the matter either de novo or from the stage it was so transferred." The Additional Solicitor General, VT Gopalan, brought this notification to the Court's attention, claiming that the Court was thereby divested of jurisdiction over the Patent Controller's Order. Shanti Bhushan, however, took the position that under the plain language of section 117G, the transfer of all pending cases to the Appellate Board was not self-executing, and required a further notification from the Central Government, after section 117G came into effect, to transfer all pending cases. Due to the uncertainty in the exact operation of the Government's notification, the Court asked Gopalan to seek instruction from the Government as to how it wants to proceed. The matter will resume tomorrow on this issue. In solidarity, Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit Anand Chan Julie Prathibha --------------------------------- Sucker-punch spam with award-winning protection. Try the free Yahoo! Mail Beta. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070403/075033f1/attachment.html From nair.latha at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 16:35:26 2007 From: nair.latha at gmail.com (Latha Nair) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 16:35:26 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 1 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <5dcc62f70704030405w4e5f0ff6nec7be3fe38194865@mail.gmail.com> Dear Rahul, I'm from batch of '94 NLS. I do remember you. As for your query, since teh underlying works in the sound recording are owned by different parties, Y must obtain licenses from them. This is infact the prevailing practise in Indian film and entertainment industry. There are two copyright societies under Section 33 namely Phonographic Performances Limited (PPL) and Indian Performing Rights Society (IPRS) which are vested with the right to administer these rights on behalf of the owners. While PPL grants licenses for sound recording, IPRS grants the same for musical works and lyrics. I am not aware of any case directly to the point, but you could read IPRS v. EIMP Association SC 1443 (including the footnote therein by J. Krishna Iyer) and also the recent conflicting opinions of the Bomaby and Delhi HCs in the cases of Phonographic Performances Limited v. Music Broadcast Pvt Ltd (2004 PTC 282) and Super Cassettes Industries Limited v. Entertainment Network Limited (2004 PTC 8) which will be helpful in clarifying the issue. Hope this is helpful. Best regards, Latha Nair On 4/1/07, commons-law-request at sarai.net wrote: > > Send commons-law mailing list submissions to > commons-law at sarai.net > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > commons-law-request at sarai.net > > You can reach the person managing the list at > commons-law-owner at sarai.net > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of commons-law digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Basic Copyright Query (Rahul Cherian) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 10:49:49 +0000 > From: "Rahul Cherian" > Subject: [Commons-Law] Basic Copyright Query > To: commons-law at sarai.net > Message-ID: > Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed > > Hi, > > I had a query on the first principles of copyright. > > If X is the owner of copyright in a sound recording of a song and X grants > a > license to Y to communicate the sound recording to the public, should Y > also > get licenses from the owners of the underlying musical and literary works > for communication of the sound recording to the public? > > My understanding of the issue is that the owner of copyright in the sound > recording has the exclusive right to communicate the sound recording to > the > public and no license is required from the owners of the underlying > musical > and literary work since neither the musical work or the literary work are > being communicated to the public. > > Any case law on the subject would be useful. > > Thanks, > > Rahul Cherian Jacob > > Mobile: 98403 57991 > > > > > >From: chan park > >To: ip-health at lists.essential.org, commons-law at sarai.net > >Subject: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update, 30.03.07 > >Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2007 00:49:20 -0700 (PDT) > > > >The Novartis appeal resumed today, with Bhushan resuming his critique of > >the IIT and IICT studies that were submitted by Natco to show that the > >β-crystalline form invariably formed when the mesylate salt was > >produced. He pointed to Example 1 of the Indian specification, which > >showed how to create the α-crystal form. He then showed that one of > >the experiments conducted by IICT was essentially identical to the > example > >cited in the Indian specification. He concluded from this that the > >imatinib free base that Natco had supplied to IICT must have been > >contaminated with β-crystal seeds, thus inevitably resulting in the > >β-crystal. He alleged that Natco must have reverse engineered the > >imatinib free base from the β-crystal form, thus resulting in the > >contamination. > > > > > >In this context, he again discussed an affidavit submitted by Novartis' > >expert, who concluded that the β-crystal form must have been > attained > >through contamination. > > > > > >Bhushan then pointed to Hetero's pending application for the amorphous > form > >of imatinib mesylate, and claimed that this proved that, contrary to > >Natco's allegations, the β-crystalline form is not obtained > >invariably. He also pointed to Natco's own admissions which showed that > >Natco, Cipla and other companies had applied for and received marketing > >approval on the α-form of imatinib mesylate. He further cited to > >other references to show that forms other than the β-form were known > >and being used by the generic companies. > > > > > >Bhushan then read out the Order of the Patent Controller in which he > dealt > >with Novartis' argument that it was entitled to a selection patent, to > show > >that the Controller had not applied his mind on the issue of selection > >patents. Bhushan pointed out that Novartis had specifically raised the > >issue of selection patents, but that the issue was never dealt with in > the > >Order. > > > > > >Bhushan then argued that on the issue of claiming wrong priority, first > >that the relevant law to be applied in this case was the current law, > which > >presumes all countries to be convention countries unless otherwise > >specified. Even if wrong priority had been claimed, Bhushan argued that > >this was not a ground for rejection, because this would only serve to > >change the priority date to July 1998. He claimed that nothing had been > >published between 1997 and 1998 that would affect the patentability of > the > >subject application. > > > > > >With this, Bhushan closed his arguments. > > > > > >The Court adjourned early for the weekend. The matter will likely resume > >on Monday. We will continue our updates then. > > > > > >In solidarity, > > > > > >Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit > > > >Anand > >Chan > >Julie > >Divya > > > > > > > >--------------------------------- > >It's here! Your new message! > >Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. > > > >_______________________________________________ > >commons-law mailing list > >commons-law at sarai.net > >https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > > _________________________________________________________________ > It's tax season, make sure to follow these few simple tips > > http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/PreparationTips/PreparationTips.aspx?icid=HMMartagline > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > > > End of commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 1 > ****************************************** > -- Latha R Nair M-88 First Floor Saket New Delhi - 110 017 INDIA -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070403/736f7abe/attachment.html From the.solipsist at gmail.com Tue Apr 3 20:39:08 2007 From: the.solipsist at gmail.com (Pranesh Prakash) Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2007 20:39:08 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] 'Da Vinci Code' appeal fails Message-ID: <4785f1e20704030809i3fec6fb4s190cfae74866bdac@mail.gmail.com> Dear All, In short: 1. Baigent and Leigh lose in the Da Vinci Code High Court appeal 2. Stanford launches Copyright Renewal Database 3. EMI releases copy-protection-free music on iTunes. >From The Times March 29, 2007 Authors face £3m bill after Da Vinci Code appeal fails Alan Hamilton The novellist Dan Brown did not copy large parts of another book to produce *The Da Vinci Code*, the Court of Appeal ruled yesterday. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the three authors of *The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail*, had pursued their claim for copyright infringement after losing their original case in the High Court last year. They now face a legal bill approaching £3 million. They had declined to accept Mr Justice Peter Smith's ruling against their assertion that the theme of Brown's book had been taken from their own of 1982. Both works are published by Random House, which was the defendant in the case, rather than Brown. Lord Justice Mummery, one of the three judges who gave their ruling yesterday, said that the copyright of HBHG — as the book came to be known in the High Court — existed to protect the skill and labour of Baigent and Leigh in researching and composing the work, and the original way in which it was expressed. "It does not, however, extend to clothing information, facts, ideas, theories and themes with exclusive property rights, so as to enable the claimants to monopolise historical research or knowledge and prevent the legitimate use of historical and biographical material, theories propounded, general arguments deployed or general hypotheses suggested (whether they are sound or not) or general themes written about." Baigent and Leigh's book deals with a theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had a child whose blood-line continues today, with a secret society protecting their heirs against wicked conspiracies enacted by the Church. A similar theme is explored in *The Da Vinci Code*, which has earned Brown hundreds of millions of pounds. Brown, who did not attend the Appeal Court but spent three days in the witness box at the earlier hearing, said at the time that Baigent and Leigh's claims were "completely fanciful" and that their book was only one of many that he consulted while researching his. At the end of the High Court hearing the judge ordered that Baigent and Leigh pay 85 per cent of Random House's legal costs, estimated at nearly £1.3 million, plus their own costs of a similar amount. Yesterday Random House was awarded the costs of the appeal, estimated at £300,000 for each side. Gail Rebuck, head of Random House, said after yesterday's judgment: "We believe that the case should never have come to court in the first place and regret that even more time and money was spent trying to appeal against the original judgment. "Misguided claims like the one we have faced and the appeal are not good for authors and not good for publishers." Baigent and Leigh issued a joint statement expressing their disappointment at the ruling. They denied being part of a public relations conspiracy to promote both books and the subsequent film of *The Da Vinci Code*. That Brown did copy from their work had been accepted by the judges, Baigent and Leigh said, but they had ruled that it did not amount to a breach of copyright. Brown's creation of a character named Leigh Teabing — a play on their names — and a mention of their book were insufficient (sic) acknowledgement. Battle of the bestsellers The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail — First published: 1982 — Copies sold: Two million — Publisher: Arrow — Length: 614 pages — What they said: "Years after its original publication, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail remains a brilliant and delirious synthesis of historical fact and utter rubbish." Peter Guttridge, The Observer The Da Vinci Code — First published: 2004 — Copies sold: Forty million — Publisher: Random House — Length: 560 pages — What they said: "This is without doubt, the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype-driven, clotheared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction that I have read." Peter Miller, The Times ---------- Stanford Report, April 2, 2007 Stanford launches Copyright Renewal Database An online database that enables people to search copyright-renewal records for books published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 has been launched by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR). For full report, visit: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/april4/copy-040407.html ---------- EMI has announced that it will offer copyright protection free music on Apple's iTunes music store. However customers will have to pay extra for the privilege. Apple's iTunes Store, which will be the first online music store to sell EMI's new downloads will offer the new DRM (Digital Rights Management) tracks for 20p more in the UK than tracks that carry the copyright protection For full report, visit: http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/7212/8236/apple-emi-drop-drm-protection.phtml -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070403/5b781b66/attachment.html From chansoobak at yahoo.com Wed Apr 4 18:33:57 2007 From: chansoobak at yahoo.com (chan park) Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2007 06:03:57 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update 4.4.07 Message-ID: <20070404130357.82040.qmail@web37704.mail.mud.yahoo.com> After yesterday's hearing, the Central Government issued a second notification stating that all pending appeals in the High Court shall be transferred to the Appellate Board. As per the notification, the High Court transferred the appeal of the Patent Controller's order to the Board. The parties will submit written submissions on the 3(d) matter within a week, after which the Court will issue a decision. We will resume our updates when the matter is taken up by the Appellate Board. In solidarity, Lawyers Collective HIV/AIDS Unit Anand Chan Julie Prathiba --------------------------------- Finding fabulous fares is fun. Let Yahoo! FareChase search your favorite travel sites to find flight and hotel bargains. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070404/ae6f340c/attachment.html From gerrold at noos.fr Wed Apr 4 22:36:11 2007 From: gerrold at noos.fr (Khalil Elouardighi - Act Up-Paris) Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:06:11 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update 4.4.07 In-Reply-To: <20070404130357.82040.qmail@web37704.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: > The parties will submit written submissions on the 3(d) matter within a week, > after which the Court will issue a decision. > > We will resume our updates when the matter is taken up by the Appellate Board. Chan, I don't understand : Court will rule when on 3(d) ? Thanks so much for the updates, Khalil. From rajasekaranab at scopeknowledge.com Fri Apr 6 15:39:32 2007 From: rajasekaranab at scopeknowledge.com (Rajasekaran) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 15:39:32 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 7 In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20070406100247.A26F728D795@mail.sarai.net> Yes the Court will rule on the constitutional validity of Sec.3(d) ab.rajasekaran A. B. RAJASEKARAN Sr.Manager-Patents Scope e-Knowledge Center Pvt. Ltd. Temple Tower, 2nd Floor, 672, Anna Salai, Nandanam, Chennai 600 035.INDIA Tel: 0091 44 2431 4201 Fax: 0091 44 2431 4206 www.scopeknowledge.com -----Original Message----- From: commons-law-bounces at sarai.net [mailto:commons-law-bounces at sarai.net] On Behalf Of commons-law-request at sarai.net Sent: Friday, April 06, 2007 3:30 PM To: commons-law at sarai.net Subject: commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 7 Send commons-law mailing list submissions to commons-law at sarai.net To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to commons-law-request at sarai.net You can reach the person managing the list at commons-law-owner at sarai.net When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of commons-law digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Novartis Update 4.4.07 (Khalil Elouardighi - Act Up-Paris) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:06:11 +0200 From: Khalil Elouardighi - Act Up-Paris Subject: Re: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update 4.4.07 To: chan park , Message-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > The parties will submit written submissions on the 3(d) matter within a week, > after which the Court will issue a decision. > > We will resume our updates when the matter is taken up by the Appellate Board. Chan, I don't understand : Court will rule when on 3(d) ? Thanks so much for the updates, Khalil. ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ commons-law mailing list commons-law at sarai.net https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law End of commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 7 ****************************************** Disclaimer: This message is being sent from Scope e-Knowledge Center P Ltd. and may contain information which is confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message and any attachments without retaining a copy. Any unauthorized use of the content of this message can expose the responsible party to civil and/or criminal penalties, and may constitute a more serious offence. Further the company does not accept liability for any errors, omissions, viruses or computer problems experienced as a result of this transmission . If you have received this message in error, notice is hereby given that no representation,contract or other binding obligation shall be created by this e-mail. From lawrence at altlawforum.org Fri Apr 6 21:58:24 2007 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:58:24 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Between Law and Justice- A Reader on Law and Society Message-ID: <46167528.7050506@altlawforum.org> Hi All Any one who has done research on "Law and Society" in India will know how difficult the terrain can be because of the fact that a lot of the material is scattered in various places (defunct journals, musty libraries). A few of us have started a modest attempt at putting together a database of research on law and society in India. This has primarily entailed photocopying and scanning articles from different sources. We have put together Version 1 of this database "Between Law and Justice: A Law and Society Reader". The database is in the form of a DVD and currently has around 400 articles covering the following issues. 1. Legal histories Colonial Postcolonial 2. Constitutional promises and perils 3. Siting struggles: human rights and social justice 4. Roti, kapadda aur makaan: law, livelihood and development 5. Supreme, yet fallible 6. Crime and punishment 7. Access to justice 8. Citizens/denizens 9. Edge of desire: law, gender and sexuality 10. In a minority 11. Green justice 12. Media law & free speech 13. Governance 14. Life of law amidst globalisation 15. Legal education 16. Interdisciplinary challenges 17. International law For more information on the database please see http://www.altlawforum.org/Resources/law_soc/ For a detailed table of contents please see http://www.altlawforum.org/Resources/law_soc/Table%20of%20contents.pdf If anyone is interested in having a copy of the DVD for private use, for research or educational purposes please write to j.nichani at gmail.com Lawrence -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070406/1627b4cc/attachment.html From paivakil at gmail.com Fri Apr 6 16:23:16 2007 From: paivakil at gmail.com (Mahesh T. Pai) Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2007 16:23:16 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Novartis Update 4.4.07 In-Reply-To: <20070406100247.A26F728D795@mail.sarai.net> <20070406100247.A26F728D795@mail.sarai.net> References: <20070406100247.A26F728D795@mail.sarai.net> Message-ID: <20070406105316.GA23778@nandini.home> Rajasekaran said on Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 03:39:32PM +0530,: > Yes the Court will rule on the constitutional validity of Sec.3(d) But my understanding wat that the High Court was divested of jurisdiction by the notification, and the matter will be transferred to the appellate body? Will somebody please clarify? > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of commons-law digest..." -- Mahesh T. Pai <<>> http://paivakil.blogspot.com/ DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. From hbs.law at gmail.com Mon Apr 9 13:13:48 2007 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 13:13:48 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... Message-ID: <8b60429e0704090043xa5c97dbofc12b564d578765d@mail.gmail.com> I admire Scott Adams as a cartoonist and humorist who brought us the "Dilbert" comics. Since he is a creator himself, his views value a lot. An excerpt from what he said on Dilbert Blog about copyrights is below. As usual, Scott puts it in his own comical form the whole idea of copyrights. Cheers, Hasit "I understand the point that copyright violations are different from theft of physical property, but is it a victimless crime? When you violate a copyright, you take something valuable from the copyright owner that he can't get back. You take his right to control where his creation is viewed and how. It might be your opinion that the "free publicity" you provide outweighs the loss – and you might be right – but you've taken from the creator the right to make the publicity-versus-overexposure decision himself. That might not seem like a big deal to you, but it feels that way to the person who lost control of his art. Let me give you an analogy. Let's say your neighbor sneaks into your house while you are gone and borrows your underpants. After wearing your underpants all day, the neighbor launders them, folds them neatly, and returns them to your house in perfect condition, all while you are gone. He tells himself that he will say good things to people about your business – whatever business that is – so this arrangement is good publicity for you. The next time he sees you, he tells you about the underpants because he figures you'll thank him for saying nice things about his business. He informs you that it's a win-win scenario. Given that you have full use of your property (the underpants), is it a victimless crime? I would say the owner of the underpants lost something even though his property is physically the same (Link to full article is here: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/04/is_copyright_vi.html ) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070409/5663d1af/attachment.html From lawrence at altlawforum.org Mon Apr 9 14:19:26 2007 From: lawrence at altlawforum.org (Lawrence Liang) Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:19:26 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... In-Reply-To: <8b60429e0704090043xa5c97dbofc12b564d578765d@mail.gmail.com> References: <8b60429e0704090043xa5c97dbofc12b564d578765d@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4619FE16.2050907@altlawforum.org> I have personally been a bigger fan of Calvin and Hobbes than of Dilbert, and the creator of Calvin Bill Waterson had a very interesting experience with the realities of the copyright and licensing system; The assumption that copyright is meant for the poor struggling author is often a misguided one, since in reality the creators of material are rarely the owners. And in fact more and more one even sees copyright being used against the creators of material itself, as Tim Maloney for instance discovered. So extracting a small piece by Bill Waterson on creativity, merchandising and exploitation I recently wrote to Universal Publishers for permission to reprint one strip from Calvin and Hobbes for a non profit publication, and was told that the use of a single strip would be in the $1,200 range Lawrence ===== Extract 1 For years, Universal pressured me to compromise on a 'limited' licensing program. The syndicate would agree to rule out the most offensive products if I would agree to go along with the rest. This would be, in essence, my only shot at controlling what happened to my work. The idea of bartering principles was offensive to me and I refused to compromise. With neither of us valuing what the other had to offer, compromise was impossible. One of us was going to trample the interests of the other. By the strip's fifth year, the debate had gone as far as it could possible go, and I prepared to quit. If I could not control what 'Calvin and Hobbes' stood for, the strip was worthless to me. But at this point, the syndicate agreed to renegotiate my contract. The exploitation rights to the strip were returned to me, and I will not license 'Calvin and Hobbes.'" Extract 2 My attitude toward the strip's production also put me in a strange position when the pressure built to license Calvin and Hobbes. On the one hand, it provided a simple clarity in the decision to forgo all merchandising. I didn't think greeting cards, T-shirts, or plush dolls fit with the spirit or message of my comic strip, and I didn't like the idea of using this hard-won, precious job to peddle a bunch of trinkets. I wanted to draw cartoons, not run an empire, so the offers and requests were not tempting in the slightest. On the other hand, none of my reasons for declining involved business considerations, so these arguments were not particularly persuasive to my syndicate, which flat-out owned the rights to my work and stood to split the immense wealth these products likely would have generated. Over the years, I've come to realize that it's almost impossible to make anyone understand why, five years into the culmination of my life's dreams, I was ready to quit the strip and lose everything, rather than get appallingly rich off Calvin and Hobbes products. All I can say is, I worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then cartooning meant very little to me. In hindsight I see that, with so much money at stake, the artistic issues I argued about were irrelevant. In the end, it was simply might makes right. I was an unknown cartoonist when I started, and my contractual disadvantage reflected my nonexistent bargaining power when I got the job. Five years later, I was a big enough gorilla that I could turn the tables. Even though I finally got my way, the whole mess is depressing to recall, even all these years later. The fight was personally traumatic. For several years it poisoned what had been a happy relationship with my syndicate, and in my disillusionment and disgust at being pushed to the wall, I lost the conviction that I wanted to spend my life cartooning. Both sides paid a heavy price for this battle. Bill Waterson, Creator of Calvin and Hobbes (Introduction to Collected Calvin and Hobbes) From vinay at nls.ac.in Mon Apr 9 22:59:03 2007 From: vinay at nls.ac.in (Vinay Aravind) Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 22:59:03 +0530 (IST) Subject: [Commons-Law] commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 10 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <22435.59.144.174.163.1176139743.squirrel@59.144.174.163> While I am wary of precipitating a Dilbert v/s Calvin debate and sidetracking the 'issue at hand', I must start this by saying that I do prefer Dilbert to Calvin, if for nothing but to establish that I bear no ill will to Scott Adams. But apart from creating some brilliant cartoons and writing some immensely enjoyable spoof books, a lot of the stuff that he opines on his blog has appeared to be ill informed and an example of the belief that you can couch anything in humour (and use a self-deprecatory tone) and it automatically becomes unassailable. For instance he has written extensively on the creationism debate and while issuing disclaimers against being classified as a creationist, he has essentially supported the 'intelligent design' theory using the logic of 'it's so complex, it has to have been designed by someone.' In this particular instance the underpants analogy is deliberately disingenuous and fails to recognise the basic fallacy that one downloaded song (or even 12,000) does not, and cannot co-relate to a lost sale. It is a different matter that I am not supporting the abolition of copyright, or denying its utility in entirety, but a balanced perspective wouldn't be too much to ask, right? I fail to understand why each side of the "IP debate" cannot refrain from exaggerations and mis-statements and convenient misrepresentations to get their views across. No solution will ever be found this way. From chansoobak at yahoo.com Tue Apr 10 17:46:24 2007 From: chansoobak at yahoo.com (chan park) Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 05:16:24 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [Commons-Law] Reuters: India asks Novartis to withdraw patent challenge Message-ID: <227472.46430.qm@web37707.mail.mud.yahoo.com> http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/DEL227077.htm By Kamil Zaheer NEW DELHI, April 10 (Reuters) - India is "very concerned" that a challenge by Swiss drug giant Novartis AG to local patent law could restrict the global supply of cheap anti-AIDS drugs, its health minister said on Tuesday. "We urge Novartis to desist from this and withdraw from this," Anbumani Ramadoss told reporters in the Indian capital. Novartis has gone to the Madras High Court in the southern Indian city of Chennai against a law that blocks the patenting of minor improvements in known molecules. India is a key source of cheap generic medicines, and advocacy groups worry that millions of poor people could lose access to key drugs if Novartis succeeds in its challenge. "We are also very concerned about it," Ramadoss said, when asked if the outcome of the court case could affect the supply of affordable anti-AIDS drugs from India. The Swiss pharmaceutical firm has argued that a tightening of intellectual property laws would increase investment for developing more drugs, and says the Indian patent system stifles innovation. But Ramadoss warned Novartis that New Delhi could be forced to overrule patents and issue licences for firms to produce vital drugs, if deemed in the public interest. "India has not used compulsory licensing so far," he said. "So we shouldn't be pushed towards that." Last week, the Madras High Court reserved its verdict on the Novartis challenge against the Indian patent system. It also ordered that another challenge by Novartis to a January decision that rejected its patent application for a cancer drug, Glivec, be referred to an appellate board. The application was turned down because the drug was a new form of a known substance. On the wider patent challenge, Medicins Sans Frontieres has said tens of thousands of people being treated for AIDS would suffer if the Swiss firm won its legal battle in India. The closely watched case in the Madras High Court has become a key battle in the long-running war between multinational drug firms and humanitarian campaigners, who say "big pharma" is putting patents ahead of patients. India is home to the world's largest population living with HIV/AIDS, an estimated 5.7 million people. (Additional reporting by Manjusha Chatterjee) --------------------------------- Food fight? Enjoy some healthy debate in the Yahoo! Answers Food & Drink Q&A. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070410/6ab8240c/attachment.html From jeebesh at sarai.net Wed Apr 11 10:32:55 2007 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:32:55 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Self Publishing Site Message-ID: <11BAD802-19EA-431A-A8D4-12E1E95AF647@sarai.net> dear all, Recently a dear friend of mine (umashankar) published a volume of his poetry (1967 to 1997) in a self publishing site www.lulu.com He has named his collection "From a Previous Century". http://www.lulu.com/content/769330 This self-publishing site is incredible in terms of the number of titles and range of areas. People from various backgrounds have written full manuscripts and you can read the entire manuscript online (preview) or download it (at a cost) or buy a print version (at a higher cost). This print version is made by lulu on demand and there is a royalty sharing arrangement with the authors. There are three broad licenses. In "find me works I can use for commercial purpose" one can find the title "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus. Pages after pages of recipe books in works with license "Copy and distribute" "Best Computers Ever Customer Guide" can be modified, adapted, or built upon. There are also reviews of books and you can rate a book. have a look. best jeebesh From k.ravisrinivas at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 17:21:08 2007 From: k.ravisrinivas at gmail.com (ravi srinivas) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 17:21:08 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] India asks Novartis to withdraw patent challenge Message-ID: I think it is too late now to ask so.If Novartis withdraws it may be inferred that they withdrew due to 'pressure' from the govt. of india. Having filed the case and defended it in the court their withdrawl now would appear as if they had been 'coerced' to do so. The case should be seen as an opportunity to test the legal validity of Section 3(d). k.ravi srinivas -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070411/467c28ee/attachment.html From hbs.law at gmail.com Wed Apr 11 19:34:00 2007 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:34:00 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... (Lawrence Liang) (Hasit Seth) Message-ID: <8b60429e0704110704y10845647k7a808f54a395ee21@mail.gmail.com> Hi Lawerence and everyone reading this, There is no element of force in requiring an author to use an agency. An author can remain the owner of a copyright and have the ultimate control over what can and cannot be done with his/her work. When an author chooses to use a syndication service, or for that matter any in between agency, there is a barter of sharing or relinquishing control over work in return for wider, faster or more efficient distribution. Now, this is an entirely free will, market driven process with author in full control. Once an author has done this, then to revert back into an emotional wail about "how great was my control over work once upon a time" is an absurd argument that sounds head-or-tail, I want to win either way. An author wants distribution because distribution or propagation is not merely a channel. It adds commercial value (can vary all the time) to the work, and if commercial value is not the aim then an author can keep the work private, arrange distribution himself/herself or just release it in public domain. A case in point is the fresh example of a famed violinist Joshua Bell playing his Stradivari violin in a subway station in Washington D.C. Bell is an artist who can command upwards of $1,000 per minute, in whose show $100 is the minimum ticket, and the maestro stood in a D.C. subway station and earned a grand sum of $32 and change for playing three of classical music's best and difficult to master violin pieces. A video of it is available and you can see (in a compressed form) that a 1,097 people walked by and ignored the music of Bell. The $32 reached there because one person recognized him and gave $20! There is a quote there from the curator of National Gallery of Art that without a frame the art painting may not be "worth" much. This is the value that distribution adds to work. Now, to take benefit of it and then complain after years later that you have lost control over the art is unfair and to some extent hypocrisy. (Joshua Bell Experiment with video can be see here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html?hpid=topnews). For the numerically minded, in a discounted cash flow analysis, a popular method used in valuation, a rupee early in time is worth much more than future cash flow. If an author is getting upfront money (book deal, advances) that is worth much more given the life of copyright. Strangely, in copyrights there is this great emphasis over the original authors rights (e.g. attribution, etc) being protected or recognized even after any number of ownership changes or passage of time. But such is not the case for inventors, where the argument is so what if he or she created it first? hasn't the original inventor done only incremental innovation built upon work by others? Society is very eager to extinguish the rights of an inventor as compared to an author. The short term of patent and a far longer term of copyright makes it very clear where societial preferences lie. On the other hand, it is highly questionable that the amount of effort that goes into creating a romantic poem which passes no test of originality merits longer protection than an invention that needs to be novel, useful and non-obvious to be patentable in first place. Could have developed this further, there is lot to say...sorry ran out of time. Regards, Hasit On 4/9/07, commons-law-request at sarai.net wrote: > > Send commons-law mailing list submissions to > commons-law at sarai.net > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > commons-law-request at sarai.net > > You can reach the person managing the list at > commons-law-owner at sarai.net > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of commons-law digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... (Hasit seth) > 2. Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... (Lawrence Liang) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2007 13:13:48 +0530 > From: "Hasit seth" > Subject: [Commons-Law] Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... > To: commons-law at sarai.net > Message-ID: > <8b60429e0704090043xa5c97dbofc12b564d578765d at mail.gmail.com> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" > > I admire Scott Adams as a cartoonist and humorist who brought us the > "Dilbert" comics. Since he is a creator himself, his views value a lot. An > excerpt from what he said on Dilbert Blog about copyrights is below. As > usual, Scott puts it in his own comical form the whole idea of copyrights. > > Cheers, > Hasit > > "I understand the point that copyright violations are different from theft > of physical property, but is it a victimless crime? > > When you violate a copyright, you take something valuable from the > copyright > owner that he can't get back. You take his right to control where his > creation is viewed and how. It might be your opinion that the "free > publicity" you provide outweighs the loss – and you might be right – but > you've taken from the creator the right to make the > publicity-versus-overexposure decision himself. That might not seem like a > big deal to you, but it feels that way to the person who lost control of > his > art. > > Let me give you an analogy. Let's say your neighbor sneaks into your house > while you are gone and borrows your underpants. After wearing your > underpants all day, the neighbor launders them, folds them neatly, and > returns them to your house in perfect condition, all while you are gone. > He > tells himself that he will say good things to people about your business – > whatever business that is – so this arrangement is good publicity for you. > The next time he sees you, he tells you about the underpants because he > figures you'll thank him for saying nice things about his business. He > informs you that it's a win-win scenario. > > Given that you have full use of your property (the underpants), is it a > victimless crime? I would say the owner of the underpants lost something > even though his property is physically the same > (Link to full article is here: > > http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/04/is_copyright_vi.html > ) > -------------- next part -------------- > An HTML attachment was scrubbed... > URL: > http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070409/5663d1af/attachment.html > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 2 > Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:19:26 +0530 > From: Lawrence Liang > Subject: [Commons-Law] Scott Adams (Dilbert Comics) on Copyright... > To: commons-law at sarai.net > Message-ID: <4619FE16.2050907 at altlawforum.org> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"; format=flowed > > I have personally been a bigger fan of Calvin and Hobbes than of > Dilbert, and the creator of Calvin > Bill Waterson had a very interesting experience with the realities of > the copyright and licensing system; The assumption that copyright is > meant for the poor struggling author is often a misguided one, since in > reality the creators of material are rarely the owners. And in fact more > and more one even sees copyright being used against the creators of > material itself, as Tim Maloney for instance discovered. So extracting a > small piece by Bill Waterson on creativity, merchandising and exploitation > > I recently wrote to Universal Publishers for permission to reprint one > strip from Calvin and Hobbes for a non profit publication, and was told > that the use of a single strip would be in the $1,200 range > > Lawrence > > ===== > > Extract 1 > > For years, Universal pressured me to compromise on a 'limited' licensing > program. The syndicate would agree to rule out the most offensive > products if I would agree to go along with the rest. This would be, in > essence, my only shot at controlling what happened to my work. The idea > of bartering principles was offensive to me and I refused to compromise. > > With neither of us valuing what the other had to offer, compromise was > impossible. One of us was going to trample the interests of the other. > By the strip's fifth year, the debate had gone as far as it could > possible go, and I prepared to quit. If I could not control what 'Calvin > and Hobbes' stood for, the strip was worthless to me. > > But at this point, the syndicate agreed to renegotiate my contract. The > exploitation rights to the strip were returned to me, and I will not > license 'Calvin and Hobbes.'" > > Extract 2 > > > > My attitude toward the strip's production also put me in a strange > position when the pressure built to license Calvin and Hobbes. On the > one hand, it provided a simple clarity in the decision to forgo all > merchandising. I didn't think greeting > cards, T-shirts, or plush dolls fit with the spirit or message of my > comic strip, and I didn't like the idea of using this hard-won, precious > job to peddle a bunch of trinkets. I wanted to draw cartoons, not run an > empire, so the offers and requests were not tempting in the slightest. > On the other hand, none of my reasons for declining involved business > considerations, so these arguments were not particularly persuasive to > my syndicate, which flat-out owned the rights to my work and stood to > split the immense wealth these products likely would have generated. > > Over the years, I've come to realize that it's almost impossible to make > anyone understand why, five years into the culmination of my life's > dreams, I was ready to quit the strip and lose everything, rather than > get appallingly rich off Calvin and Hobbes products. All I can say is, I > worked too long to get this job, and worked too hard once I got it, to > let other people run away with my creation once it became successful. If > I could not control what my own work was about and stood for, then > cartooning meant very little to me. > > In hindsight I see that, with so much money at stake, the artistic > issues I argued about were irrelevant. In the end, it was simply might > makes right. I was an unknown cartoonist when I started, and my > contractual disadvantage reflected my nonexistent bargaining power when > I got the job. Five years later, I was a big enough gorilla that I could > turn the tables. Even though I finally got my way, the whole mess is > depressing to recall, even all these years later. The fight was > personally traumatic. For several years it poisoned what had been a > happy relationship with my syndicate, and in my disillusionment and > disgust at being pushed to the wall, I lost the conviction that I wanted > to spend my life cartooning. Both sides paid a heavy price for this > battle. > > Bill Waterson, Creator of Calvin and Hobbes (Introduction to Collected > Calvin and Hobbes) > > > > ------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > commons-law mailing list > commons-law at sarai.net > https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/commons-law > > > End of commons-law Digest, Vol 45, Issue 10 > ******************************************* > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070411/4c65f427/attachment.html From eddank at aya.yale.edu Tue Apr 17 09:53:56 2007 From: eddank at aya.yale.edu (Eddan Katz) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:23:56 -0400 Subject: [Commons-Law] Yale ISP's 2nd Annual Access to Knowledge conference (A2K2) Message-ID: <906580E2-28DE-4EAA-AF10-843E64C9BD10@aya.yale.edu> **Remote participation in the A2K2 conference on the accompanyong Wiki: http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki/index.php/Yale_A2K2. We invite you to contribute background materials on access to knowledge issues and to suggest questions to be addressed on the individual panels. 2nd Annual Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K2) Yale Information Society Project April 27-29, 2007 Yale Law School http://research.yale.edu/isp/eventsa2k2.html REGISTRATION is still OPEN at https://wems.worldtek.com/yaleA2K2 A2K2 Open Wiki: http://research.yale.edu/isp/a2k/wiki/index.php/ Yale_A2K2 The last several years have witnessed the coalescing of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) social movement that champions human rights, human development, and the public interest as the focal points of innovation and information policy. The Yale Information Society Project's (ISP) first A2K conference advanced our commitment to building a broad conceptual framework of Access to Knowledge that can foster powerful coalitions between diverse groups. The A2k conference brought together leading scholars and activists from all over the world to participate in the construction of an intellectual framework for access to knowledge. Full conference proceedings and foundational resources for Access to Knowledge are available at the Yale A2K conference wiki. This year, on April 27th-29th 2007, the weekend of World Intellectual Property Day, the A2K2 conference promises be a pivotal event mobilizing the A2K coalition. Taking place between sessions of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in which the Development Agenda is being formalized, this gathering is an oportunity to help define the emerging vision of innovation and information policy. A2K2 will further build the coalition amongst institutions and stakeholders that crystallized at the first landmark conference, help set the agenda for A2K policy and advocacy, and deepen the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of access to knowledge issues. The A2K2 conference program is focused around mobilizing different spheres of society: Industry, Civil Society, Governments, and Technologists. The policy panels focus on a diverse set of A2K issues and are oriented towards tangible legal and technological solutions and collaborative strategies for policy makers and individual institutions. Plenary panels: - Welcoming Address & Keynotes * Harold Koh - Dean and Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law, Yale Law School * Jack Balkin - Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School * Yochai Benkler - Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law, Yale Law School - The Social Movement of A2K * Margaret Chon - Professor of Law & Director, Center for the Study of Justice in Society (CSJS), Seattle University * Ahmed Abdel Latif - Second Secretary, Department of International Organizations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Egypt * Ronaldo Lemos - Director of the Center for Technology & Society (CTS), Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School in Rio de Janeiro * James Love - Director, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) * Sisule Musungu - World Trade Institute, University of Berne * Jerome Reichman - Bunyan S. Womble Professor of Law, Duke University Law School Moderator: Amy Kapczynski - Post-Doctoral Fellow in Law and Public Health, Samuelson Fellow in the Information Society Project, Yale Law School and Yale School of Public Health - Mobilizing Industry * Brad Biddle - Senior Attorney, Intel Corporation * Andrew McLaughlin - Head, Global Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google Inc. * Nagla Rizk - Associate Professor and Chair, Economics Department, American University in Cairo * Pam Samuelson - Professor, School of Information and Boalt Hall School of Law and Co-Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, University of California, Berkeley * Jule Sigall - Senior Attorney, Legal & Corporate Affairs, Microsoft Corp. * Brent Woodworth - Worldwide Segment Manager, Crisis Response Team, IBM Corp. Moderator: Colin Maclay - Managing Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society - Mobilizing Governments * Getachew Mengitsie Alemu - Director General, Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office * Irina Bogdanovskaia - Faculty of Law, State University Higher School of Economics, Moscow; Member, Russian Committee of the UNESCO Program Information For All * Carlos Correa - Director, Masters Program on Science and Technology Policy and Management, University of Buenos Aires * David Gross - Ambassador, U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy * Luis Villaroel Villalon - Copyright Legal Advisor, Ministry of Education, Chile Moderator: Shamnad Basheer - Frank H Marks Visiting Associate Professor in Law, George Washington University Law School - Mobilizing Technologists * Getachew Mengitsie Alemu - Director General, Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office * Irina Bogdanovskaia - Faculty of Law, State University Higher School of Economics, Moscow; Member, Russian Committee of the UNESCO Program Information For All * Carlos Correa - Director, Masters Program on Science and Technology Policy and Management, University of Buenos Aires * David Gross - Ambassador, U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy * Luis Villaroel Villalon - Copyright Legal Advisor, Ministry of Education, Chile Moderator: Colin Maclay - , Global Economic Governance Programme, University of Oxford - Mobilizing Civil Society * Gwen Hinze - International Affairs Director, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) * Nnenna Nwakanma - Cabinet Member & Regional Coordinator, African Civil Society for the Information Society (ACSIS) * Josh Silver - Executive Director, Free Press * Sherwin Siy - Staff Attorney and Director, Global Knowledge Initiative, Public Knowledge * Madhavi Sunder - Professor of Law, University of California, Davis Moderator: Becky Lentz - Program Officer, Ford Foundation Policy panels: -- Partnerships for Access to Information * Serge Bounda - Chief Librarian , Sergio Vieira de Mello Library, United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya * Hala Essalmawi - IPR Officer, The Library of Alexandria (Bibliotheca Alexandrina), Egypt * Jason Phillips - Associate Director for International Library Relations, JSTOR (Journal Storage) * Crispin Taylor - Executive Director, ASPB (American Society of Plant Biologists) Moderator: Ann Okerson - Associate University Librarian, Yale University -- Internationalized Domain Names * Wei Mao - Computer Network Information System, Chinese Academy of Sciences * Ram Mohan - CTO & VP Business Operations, Afilias Limited * Milton Mueller - - Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University * Hong Xue - Microsoft Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School * Peter Yu - Associate Professor of Law and founding director of the Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program, Michigan State University College of Law Moderator: Robert Guerra - Managing Director, Privaterra -- Patent Quality * Tahir Amin - Co-founder, Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) * Daniel Ravicher - Founder and Executive Director, Public Patent Foundation * Frederick Abbott - Edward Ball Eminent Scholar, Florida State University College of Law * Arti Rai - Professor of Law, Duke University Moderator: Joshua Sarnoff - Assistant Director, Glushko- Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and Practitioner-in- Residence, Washington College of Law, American University -- Open Access Literature * Achal Prabhala - Consultant, Lawyers Collective, India * Binyavanga Wainaina - Writer-in-Residence, Union College, New York * Gary Dauphin - Blackplanet.com, Africana.com, AOL Black Voices * Rob Spillman - Editor, Tin House magazine and Executive Editor, Tin House Books * Michael Vazquez - Advisory Editor, Transition magazine Moderator: Manon Ress - Director, Information Society Projects, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) -- Search Engines * Judith Dueck - Vice-Chair, Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems International (HURIDOCS) * Niva Elkin-Koren - Vice-Dean, Faculty of Law, Haifa University, Israel * Michael Geist - Canada Research Chair in Internet and E- commerce Law, Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Canada. * Robin Gross - Executive Director, IP Justice * Richard Owens - Director, Copyright E-Commerce Technology and Management Division - WIPO Moderator: Sudhir Krishnaswamy - Head, Centre for Intellectual Property Rights Research and Advocacy (CIPRA), National Law School, India University, Bangalore -- Traditional Knowledge and Genetic Resources * Anetta Bok - Gender Representative for the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee-IPACC * Graham Dutfield - Herchel Smith Senior Research Fellow in Intellectual Property Law Queen Mary, University of London * Abena Dove Osseo-Asare - Assistant Professor, Department of History, UC Berkeley * Elpidio Peria - Associate, Third World Network (TWN) - Philippines * Antony Taubman - Head, Global Issues Division, World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Moderator: Anupam Chander - Professor of Law, University of California, Davis -- Community Media & the Global Public Sphere. * Murali Shanmugavelan - Head, Information Society Project, Panos London. * Sasha Costanza-Chock - Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California * Ethan Zuckerman - Researcher, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School. * Natasha Primo - Chair, Association for Progressive Communications (APC); Executive Director, Women's Net. * Wijayananda Jayaweera - Director, Communication Development Division, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Moderator: Fazila Farouk - Head, Civil Society Information Programme, Southern African NGO Network (SangoNet) -- Broadband Wireless in Developing Countries. * Susan Crawford - Associate Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York * Willie Currie - Program Manager, Communications and Information Policy, Association for Progressive Communications (APC) * Satish Jha - Co-Chair, World IT Forum (WITFOR) * Kaili Kan - Capacity Development Officer, IICD * Caio Pereira - Researcher and International Relations Coordinator FGV-Sao Paulo Law School Moderator: Diana Korsakaite - Director, Strategy Department, Communications Regulatory Authority, Lithuania -- Agriculture & Intellectual Property * Fleur Claessens - Programme Officer - Intellectual Property, International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) * Daniel Kevles - Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Yale University * Susan Sell - Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, George Washington University * Dalindyebo Shabalala - Staff Attorney and Director, Intellectual Property and Sustainable Development Project, Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) Moderator: Andrea Glorioso - Assistant Researcher, Politecnico di Torino -- The Political Economy of Digital Archives * Glenn Otis Brown - Products Counsel, Google, Inc. * Paul Gerhardt - Project Director, Creative Archive, BBC * Magdy Nagi - Head of ICT Sector, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria, Egypt * Denise Nicholson - Copyright Services Librarian, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa * Guy Pessach - Lecturer, The Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Moderator: Teresa Hackett - Manager, eIFL-IP, Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) -- Education in the Digital Age. * Titilayo Akinsanmi - Program Manager, Global Teenager Project, Mindset, Johannesburg, South Africa * Saskia Harmsen - Capacity Development Officer, IICD * Geidy Lung - Legal Officer, Copyright Law Division, Copyright and Related Rights Sector, WIPO * Mira Sundara Rajan - Canada Research Chair in Intellectual Property Law, Faculty of Law, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada * Andrew Rens - LINK Centre, Creative Commons, South Africa Moderator: Jack Lerner - Fellow, Samuelson Clinic, Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley -- Access to Scientific Knowledge * Chris Armbruster - Founder and Executive Director, Research Network 1989 * Subbiah Arunachalam - Distinguished Fellow, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, India * Juan Carlos de Martin - Associate Professor, Politecnico di Torino * Larry Peiperl - Senior Editor, PLoS Medicine (Public Library of Science) * Sibusiso Sibisi - President and CEO, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Pretoria, South Africa Moderator: Dan Burk - Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School From smriti at sarai.net Tue Apr 17 11:28:48 2007 From: smriti at sarai.net (smriti at sarai.net) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 07:58:48 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] 'Free Speech and Fearless Listening': seminar report Message-ID: <99a472f347ad55869d1f9093e56dab7b@sarai.net> Dear friends, Here is the link to the conference narrative of the seminar ‘Free Speech and Fearless Listening: The Encounter with Censorship in South Asia’, held at Max Muller Bhavan, Delhi, from 21-24 February 2006. The seminar was organised by the Delhi Film Archive and Films for Freedom, in association with Max Muller Bhavan and the Sarai Programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi. http://www.sarai.net/resources/event-proceedings/2006/censorship This detailed report documents perspectives on the censorship, i.e., the simultaneous repression/production, of ideas, images, beliefs, actions, bodies and modes of being... Recently the Reader-list offered a (brutal) opportunity to observe ongoing mechanisms of censorship and self-censorship, through the 5 April post by Swadhin Sen on the torture-murder of Choles Ritchil, a prominent leader of the indigenous Garo community in Bangladesh. Led by Ritchil, the community was protesting eviction from their forest habitat that the state wanted to convert into an 'Eco-Park'; there were violent clashes between protestors and state forces. Ritchil was arrested on 10 February and killed five weeks later. Ritchil was buried at Beribald village on 20 March 2007. Before the burial, as per religious customs, the body was given a bath. Those who performed the ritual bath (names withheld for safety reasons) reported the following evidence of torture: Both eyes plucked out, testicles removed, anus mutilated, palms smashed, nails of three fingers of the right hand removed, left thumbnail removed, holes in the palms, severely wounded upper right hand, two deep holes in the middle of both thighs, deep wounds on the lower legs, nail of the right big toe removed, charred back and feet, all fingers broken. Choles Ritchil is survived by his wife, son and three daughters. On 20 March his wife had filed a complaint at the Modhupur Police Station but as of 2 April the police station had not registered any case. The description of atrocity and extremity bludgeoned me into a state of paralysis (I found I could not even flinch as I read) and amnesia (for the next few hours I struggled to mentally erase the information). But I cannot forget Choles Ritchil -- whatever of him remained to be handed over to his family for the last rites. The kinsfolk and community who received this monstrous testimonial of state force -- how did they grieve? Were they able to? Or did a saving censor emerge within the mourners, to protect them from themselves? Emily Dickinson's musings on the crucifixion assure us that "After great pain a formal feeling comes/ the nerves stand ceremonious as tombs..." Could this, or any other mechanism, have protected Choles Ritchil during his slow, systematic, sadistic destruction by the agents of the law? Michel Foucault, cited in an introductory epigraph to the censorship report, tells us that censorship "links the inexistent, the illicit and the inexpressible in such a way that each is at the same time the principle and effect of the other... This logic of power exerted upon free expression is the paradoxical logic of a law that might be expressed as an injunction of non-existence, non-manifestation and silence." Sigmund Freud, also cited in an introductory epigraph,tells us "...It is a mistake to emphasise only the repulsion that operates from the direction of the conscious upon what is to be repressed. Quite as important is the attraction exercised by what was primarily repressed upon everything with which it can establish a connection." However different -- or similar -- their arguments, the archaeologist of knowledge and the astute doctor would surely have agreed that we don’t need theorists to remind us of what we should protect, always and absolutely, from internal and external censors: the conscience and the heart that keep us human. Regards, Smriti From ravikant at sarai.net Tue Apr 17 12:15:54 2007 From: ravikant at sarai.net (Ravikant) Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:15:54 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Appeal for action from Varanasi Message-ID: <200704171215.55474.ravikant@sarai.net> Apologies for cross-posting. The following letter is self explanatory. This is from a friend who has been running Varanasi-based pro-sex workers NGO called GuRiya for years and is at the moment being harassed by the local authorities in the 'jiski-laathi-uski-bhains' Uttar Pradesh. Please circulate widely. Ravikant Appeal for action   ASIAN HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION – URGENT APPEALS PROGRAM   Update on Urgent Appeal     12 March 2007   [RE: UP-035-2006: INDIA: Girls forced into prostitution still being victimized in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh; UP-131-2005: INDIA: Protection required for girls released from prostitution and for the human rights defenders who sought to help them; UA-190-2005: INDIA: Demand guarantees of proper treatment and protection for girls released from prostitution and human rights defender] ------------------------------------------------------ UP-036-2007: INDIA: Human rights activists threatened not to pursue cases against the women traffickers   INDIA: Threats to human rights activists; failure of criminal justice system; police criminal nexus ------------------------------------------------------   Dear friends   The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information that two human rights activists are facing death threats in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh state, India for their work against women trafficking in the state. It is alleged that the perpetrators are the same persons who were charged for trafficking after a complaint lodged by Mr. Ajeet Singh and Ms. Manju, two human rights activists working for a local human rights group named Guria. The AHRC in the past had issued urgent appeals regarding this case which are available at UA-190-2005, UP-131-2005 and UP-035-2006. The perpetrators who were arrested were later released on bail. It is alleged that after being released on bail by producing false bail bonds the perpetrators are now threatening Manju calling her on her mobile telephone. It is alleged that the perpetrators who are well connected with the local police, administration and certain officers within the local judiciary obtained bail in spite of Guria's caution  to the court.   DETAILED INFORMATION:   On 27 and 28 February 2007 Ms. Manju, wife of Mr. Ajeet Singh, a resident of S- 8/ 395, Khajuri Colony, Cantonment police station, Varanasi district, Uttar Pradesh, received several calls on her mobile telephone (near about 50) threatening her with death and using filthy language. The perpetrator has allegedly threatened Manju that they would kidnap her and her husband from their home and kill them. Manju received these calls on her mobile telephone with number + 919919780636. Due to these threats both Manu and her husband are living in fear.   Manju has filed a written complaint to the Superintendent of Police of Varanasi, and other authorities in the state but it is alleged that the state police has failed to identify and arrest the persons responsible for the calls.   Guria is a local human rights organization working on women and child rights in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh. On 25 October 2005, volunteers and the staff of Guria attempted the rescue of 31 women from Shivdaspur, the red light area in Varanasi. The police intervened and some of the brothel keepers were arrested and later produced in court. The police also registered cases against Ajeet and Manju on false charges of trespassing into private property.   The sequences of incidents were as follows: - on 25 October 2005 Guria and its volunteers facilitate rescue of 31 women from the brothels at Shivdaspur and hand the women over to the police. The police accept the rescued women and also charge sheet cases against four brothel keepers as Crime 274/2005 of Manduadih police station under the provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956. On a subsequent investigation into the case under pressure from Guria and due to wide media publicity the Manduadih police also registered separate crimes, Crime 279/2005 to 299/2005 against 21 accused, including brothel keepers and their assistants and agents under Section 3 (1) of the Uttar Pradesh Gangster Act on 5 November 2005.   On a further application filed by Guria on 13 November 2005 in follow-up, the Manduadih police registered yet another case against nine more persons as Crime 300/2005 under the relevant provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956. All these crimes, Crime 279/2005 to 300/2005 were registered by the Manduadih police after heavy pressure by Guria and the media after Crime 274/2005 was registered. In total there are 38 accused persons all charge sheeted on crimes connected to the complaint lodged by Guria against women trafficking in Shivdaspur. All these cases are now pending before the courts in Varanasi including the Fast Track Cases Court, the Court of the Special Judge – Gangster Cases and the Judicial Magistrate Court of Varanasi.   Once arrested, the accused were produced before the concerned courts. Once produced before the courts the accused moved for bail, most of which were rejected by the Magistrate Court. However, they managed to bail out by obtaining bail from the Sessions Court, the Special Court for Gangster cases and also from the Uttar Pradesh High Court.   Guria was aware that the brothel keepers were well connected with the local administration and for that reason they were able to run the brothel in public, even though it is an offense to do so in Indian law. The brothels are two rows of houses in Shivdaspur area in Varanasi and it is public knowledge that women, including minors are trafficked from Bangladesh and Nepal and neighboring states to Varanasi in the pretext of legitimate jobs. Guria had in the past informed the local administration about the practice, but each time when the local police raided the brothels, the women were moved to discreet places and the police had to return without registering any case. Once the police retreat, the women reappear and the business continues. From several past experiences it was clear to Guria that the brothel keepers were well connected with the local police and that no fruitful action would follow if it were for the police to take any action. The very fact is that the police  also registered cases against Guria and its volunteers also show how influential the brothel keepers are. Soon after the arrest of the brothel keepers, the person who was running the brothel was murdered in an alleged incident of encounter killing.   The brothel keepers and the other accused who were arrested were all released on bail. However when Guria came to know about the bail application, Guria tried to intervene in the case by informing the courts that the bail bonds, which include details regarding immovable property held by the guarantees, which is a regular requirement for bail, were fabricated documents. In the meanwhile Guria filed an application – Special Leave Application – before the Supreme Court of India on 12 May 2006 opposing the granting of bail to the accused on the ground that if the accused are released on bail they would tamper with the evidence and would be a threat to the witnesses in the case and also that many documents produced by the accused in court as security for bail are fabricated and forged. The court admitted the application and has issued notice to the accused. However, Guria is certain that none of the accused will be able to be traced back and brought to the court.   In India when a person moves for bail, if the court grants bail, the court issues a conditional order that the detainee will be released on bail provided the detainee produces adequate security and guarantee in court. This security and guarantee is an undertaking by a surety that the detainee if released on bail will be produced in court as and when the court requires, failing which the surety will be held responsible for the non-production of the detainee. Usually the court also insist that the surety produce records from the land records or revenue department to prove that the surety holds landed property that could be proceeded against if the surety and the detainee jump bail. These records usually are tax receipts or land records showing that the surety is in ownership and possession of the property mentioned in the document produced in court.   Dozens of such records were produced in the court to secure bail for the brothel keepers in this case. However, Guria being suspicious of these documents did their research through the land records department and they were shocked to know about the findings. Guria filed an application in court, which showed that in most cases the documents submitted by the sureties in court were fabricated.   Now that the accused have all been released on bail and that in most cases there is no possible process by which they could be brought back to the court, the cases in which they stand trial will never be adjudicated in the presence of the concerned accused. Since the accused enjoy complete impunity since they have all jumped bail and also since they are all well connected the chances of the local police tracing them is also limited. However, it is surprising to note that the concerned police officers have not taken any steps to investigate the matter and the courts have not taken any steps in spite of the fact that the courts were mislead on the face of records and the courts did not verify whether the securities were correct before granting bail to the accused.   Now that the accused are practically free they are threatening the activists associated with Guria, particularly Ajeet and his wife Manju that if they further proceeded with the case they would abduct Ajeet and Manju and may even murder them.   ADDITIONAL COMMENT:   The criminal justice system in India, particularly the judiciary, police and the prosecution suffer from serious problems that makes it impossible for these three machineries to function as they are expected to in India. The courts never receive appropriate funds to function so that every court is crowded and the judges literally have no time to verify the veracity of documents produced before it. Additionally, in this case Guria allege and their experience confirms it that most of the accused in the case are well connected and it is even feared that the influence of the accused might be long enough to tamper with the judiciary and some judges and prosecutors. No practical help is expected from the police since most police officers are corrupt and practically there is no mechanism in place to curb corruption in the police department.   There is no protection mechanism in India for witnesses so that Guria and its activists can expect the least from the court or from the state as protection against the threats they face now. If situations continue like this, Guria soon will find it really hard to continue their work in Varanasi.   SUGGESTED ACTION:   Please send a letter immediately to the Senior Superintendent of Police and the District Magistrate in Varanasi and the Chief Justice of India expressing concern in this case.   The AHRC is also writing to appropriate UN bodies asking for an intervention into the matter.   To support this appeal, please click here:   SUGGESTED LETTER:   Dear ____________,   INDIA: Human rights activists threatened not pursue cases against the women traffickers   Name and address of the victim: Mr. Ajeet Singh, and his wife Ms. Manju, residents of S- 8/ 395, Khajuri Colony, Cantonment police station, Varanasi district, Uttar Pradesh Date and time of incident: 27 – 28 February 2007 Place of incident: Varanasi District, Uttar Pradesh, India Alleged perpetrators: The accused in Crime 274/2005, 279/2005 to 300/2005 of Manduadih police station, Varanasi district, Uttar Pradesh, India   I am writing to voice my concern over the alleged death threats to human rights activists in Varanasi for working against women trafficking. It is alleged that perpetrators are the same persons who were charged for trafficking on the complaint lodged by a local group Guria working against women trafficking.   I am informed that on 27 and 28 February 2007 Manju, a human rights activist and also the wife of activist Mr. Ajeet Singh working for a local group Guria received several calls (near about 50) of threatening that both Ajeet and Manju will be abducted and even murdered if they continued working on the cases of the accused mentioned above. It is alleged that all the accused were released on bail after they produced fake bail bonds in courts. It is also alleged that even after the courts were notified that the accused have produced fake bail bonds the courts released the accused on bail and have taken no action against the accused or the sureties who produced the fake documents in the courts. It is also alleged that the accused are having good connections with the local administration and even with the lower judiciary and its officers.   It is also alleged that the accused would never return to the court, while they will remain free with the help of the local police who so far has refrained to take any action in the case.   I am concerned to know that the lower court as well as the police fail to take any action in this case were near about two dozen persons have jumped bail and are now threatening the human rights activists involved in this case.   I therefore urge you to take immediate action into this case and order an inquiry so that the entire sequence of producing fake bail bonds in court and the continuing disappearance of the accused is investigated into. I also urge you to take appropriate steps so that the victims named above are given adequate protection pending the inquiry into this case.   I am also informed that the Superintendent of Police of Varanasi has been informed that Manju has been receiving threatening calls over her mobile telephone. However I am concerned why the local police is taking no action upon the incident and is not caring to investigate into the case. I urge you to intervene in this incident and make sure that the local police do investigate into the threats Manju received on her telephone and take appropriate action against the accused.   I look forward to hearing about your positive response to this serious matter.   Yours truly,   PLEASE SEND LETTERS TO:   1. The Senior Superintendent of Police Varanasi INDIA Tel: +91 54 22502655, +91 98 3950 4898 (mobile) Fax: +91 54 2250 1450   2. The Chief Justice of India Through the Office of the Registrar General Supreme Court of India 1 Tilak Marg, New Delhi INDIA Fax: +91 11 23383792 Email: supremecourt at nic.in   3. Mr. Rajiv Agarwal District Magistrate Varanasi INDIA Tel: +91 54 2250 8585 Fax: +91 54 2234 8313 E-mail: dmvsn at satyam.net.in   4. Mr. Yashpal Singh, IPS Director General of Police Tilak Marg, Lucknow Uttar Pradesh INDIA Tel: +91 52 2220 6104 Fax: +91 52 2220 6120, 2220 6174. E-mail: police at up.nic.in   5. Mr. Mulayam Singh Yadav Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister's Secretariat Lucknow Uttar Pradesh INDIA Fax: + 91 52 2223 0002 / 2223 9234   6. The Chairperson National Human Rights Commission of India Faridkot House, Copernicus Marg New Delhi-110001 INDIA Tel: + 91 11 2307 4448/ 2338 2742 Fax: +91 11 23384863 Email: chairnhrc at nic.in   Thank you.     Urgent Appeals Programme (ua at ahrchk.org) Asian Human Rights Commission (ahrchk at ahrchk.org)     Posted on 2007-03-12   Back to [2006 Urgent Appeals]                       Asian Human Rights Commission            For any suggestions, please email to support at ahrchk.net. From a_prabhala at yahoo.co.uk Wed Apr 18 14:08:10 2007 From: a_prabhala at yahoo.co.uk (Achal Prabhala) Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:08:10 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Economic Times: Pharma firms will have to wait a while for data exclusivity norms Message-ID: <030801c78194$e763f8a0$0201a8c0@som.yale.edu> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/News_By_Industry/Healthcare__Biotech/Pharma_firms_will_have_to_wait_a_while_for_data_exclusivity_norms/articleshow/1919795.cms Pharma firms will have to wait a while for data exclusivity norms GIREESH CHANDRA PRASAD TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ WEDNESDAY, APRIL 18, 2007 01:59:00 AM] NEW DELHI: Call it the Mashelkar effect! The Satwant Reddy committee, which is examining whether MNCs should be allowed to guard their costly clinical data from local rivals, is unlikely to take a call on the issue in the near future. The decision has been taken considering the sensitive nature of the issue and the strong opposition NGOs and a section of the pharmaceutical industry recently put up against R A Mashelkar’s report on patent laws, which apparently favoured MNCs. Mr Mashelkar, who resigned from the technical expert group following charges of plagiarism, had said that not allowing patents on incremental innovation would violate WTO agreements. While the Left parties want further tightening of the law, MNC pharma companies seek a more generous regime. The law was designed in 2005 as a compromise between the two, with a commitment from the government to get it reviewed by Dr Mashelkar. Sources said that the data exclusivity panel may not submit its report by May, when Mrs Reddy is slated to retire as the chemicals and fertilisers secretary. The government apparently does not want another controversy at this point of time by granting data exclusivity — a demand from big pharma companies — which would either delay the arrival of copycat versions of patented MNC drugs in the market or make them less price competitive. Besides, the panel is yet to arrive at a consensus with the health ministry, which approves new drugs, on the issue. It is understood that health minister A Ramadoss had opposed granting of data exclusivity at the April 10 group-of-ministers meeting on the new pharmaceutical policy. Mr Ramadoss pointed out that nothing beyond protection against leakage or theft of data submitted to the government can be granted, sources said. Moreover, it is in the government’s interest to reserve grant of data exclusivity as a possible bargaining chip in the WTO negotiations later on. It is interesting to note that the former chairman of the committee and Mrs Reddy’s predecessor in the ministry, Pratyush Sinha, too, had felt at the end of his tenure that time was not ripe to take a view on the issue. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070418/391f28c6/attachment.html -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/octet-stream Size: 43 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070418/391f28c6/attachment.obj From dak at sarai.net Sat Apr 21 10:14:10 2007 From: dak at sarai.net (The Sarai Programme) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 06:44:10 +0200 Subject: [Commons-Law] {announcement} Sarai Programme/CSDS Message-ID: The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi Invites application for the post of Programme Coordinator Sarai, an interdisciplinary research and practice programme on the city and media, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, invites applications for a Programme Co-Ordinator. The Programme Coordinator will be responsible for coordinating and administering research projects, programmes, conferences and other institutional activities. In addition, the incumbent would also be responsible for liaison work with grant-making / research collaborators and the Sarai research network comprising individuals and institutions in India and abroad. The position requires administrative competence, ease and familiarity with computers, e-mail and the internet, ability to administer and create newsletters and edit web content. We are looking for someone who welcomes the challenge of independence of thought and autonomy in decision making in a work culture that also places a premium on collective functioning & team effort. Candidates should possess a masters degree in a social science discipline with a minimum of three years of relevant work experience in administration/research/coordination of research related activities in educational/research institutions and/or NGOs. Send your application along with a one page statment indicating the nature of your interests and background and an updated C.V. to: Ashish Mahajan Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29,Rajpur Road, Delhi 110054. ph: 23830065, 23983352 and 23928391. Last Date for applications: 15th of May, 2007. Selected candidates will be invited for an interview. For more details about Sarai please visit our website - www.sarai.net _______________________________________________ From a_prabhala at yahoo.co.uk Sat Apr 21 11:48:51 2007 From: a_prabhala at yahoo.co.uk (Achal Prabhala) Date: Sat, 21 Apr 2007 11:48:51 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] HT and AEI on Indian patent law Message-ID: <009101c783dc$effede90$0201a8c0@som.yale.edu> Two pleasantly dim articles on Indian patent law which provide comic relief. First, Barun Mitra puts his feeble mind to issues he doesn't quite grasp: http://beta.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?id=6ceefbc4-07c4-4454-a89b-f625ea42a52f and then Roger Bate wags his tail at the subject in: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25989/pub_detail.asp >From which we can only deduce that AEI fellows and their tropical consorts have inferior internet connections but superior mind-reading skills. Never mind that Mashelkar himself has said that his report has nothing to do with sec 3(d) of Indian patent law: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/2007-February/002358.html >>>[Mashelkar] says that he's "in total agreement with Section 3(d). The benchmarks that we set depends entirely on us. It is for any individual country to decide the threshold limits and it is through these thresholds that the governments can exercise control."<<< The upside - for all those "critics" out there, with enemies like this, who needs friends? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070421/b025672c/attachment.html From hbs.law at gmail.com Tue Apr 24 11:48:19 2007 From: hbs.law at gmail.com (Hasit seth) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 11:48:19 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Adams Strikes Back on Copyright Issue... Message-ID: <8b60429e0704232318h22c5532bva0c8c74718365d3b@mail.gmail.com> Adams replies to his critics in the only way he alone can do it. Thoroughly enjoyable and credible since he is a prolific artist and author himself. IMHO: Free - as in beer/fruit-juice - is a pricing mechanism and when married to free as in freedom which is a value judgment makes it an odd couple. The whole wierdness of the "free" debate is warped due to his odd couple. Freedom is a value more suited to or rather charecterizes individuals and groups, it is not a mechanism to transfer good or services. Free, as in price, is a market mechanism to transfer good or services. For the vast majority, free as in fruit-juice is of more relevance than free as in freedom. Free as in fruit-juice has a far longer history than free as in freedom, which is only a recent phenomenon, relatively speaking (Markets are far older than freedom). And that's not about to change, soviet-union, Marx, CPI-CPM, notwithstanding. Freedom comes and goes, as so many people in Africa, Latin America and even Pakistan know well; but markets fulfill basic necessities so they are here to stay. Free as in fruit-juice can never become the sole way for markets to work, it can only be a subsidy mechanism for an ultimate "bargain for exchange" or a charity mechansim to let have-nots participate in the exchange too. -------------------------------- .... Let me explain something about analogies. Analogies are not supposed to be identical to the thing you are making the analogy about. Imperfection is necessary. Otherwise an analogy would be, for example, "Downloading music without paying is like downloading music without paying." It doesn't add much to your understanding. The underpants analogy, in its original context, addressed the question of whether copyright violations are a victimless act. This is separate from the legal question. The point of the analogy is that the artist who loses legal control over his creation feels violated, just as you would if someone borrowed your underpants. I dare say it was one of my finest analogies, although admittedly the bar is set low. In addition, as I previously argued, when an artist loses the ability to control when, and where, his art is distributed, it can be a real economic loss, depending on his marketing plan. This led to the following brilliant criticism: 1. Adams thinks artists have the legal right to prevent you from reading a book on the toilet. Artists never had that right! Seriously. That was the criticism. I was hoping people would understand that I meant the artist would lose control of, for example, whether his book appears on the Internet before it's published on paper. I also heard the argument that any idiot knows copyright violations are good publicity, and as such, they lead to more sales. I tested this theory last year by making my book, God's Debris, available for a free download. About a million people downloaded it. Based on my e-mail, a large percentage of them loved it. (It's probably my most loved work, even though a good chunk of people felt it did a bad job of being what it wasn't intended to be.) The total number who actually went out and bought that book, or the sequel that's not available for free, is about 1,000. The free download did little but to make the economic value of my sequel appear to be zero. If giving away your work for free is such a good strategy, you have to wonder why all the major artists aren't doing it. Don't the big record companies have any economists working for them? Or is it possible that the people with advanced degrees in business and economics know more about business and economics than the people downloading music with one hand, while masturbating furiously with the other, and wishing they had a tail to hold the bong? Yes, yes, I can see how an unknown band might become popular by making its music available for free. That makes perfect sense. Luckily, every artist has that option. But as my experience with God's Debris shows, every situation is unique. If the artist loses his right to decide when, and if, his creation is available to the world for free, he loses something of potential value, even in the unlikely event that the loss leads to more sales in the long run. I can't steal a jacket from JC Penney and hope they understand that it's good publicity, thus causing several people to buy the same jacket. It isn't my right to make that decision, even if I happen to be correct. There's an argument that the world would be better if copyrighted works were available for free to anyone who wants them. I can only speak for myself, but I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have pursued creating Dilbert comics without the potential for getting rich while working at home. That was my entire motivation. I worked for about ten years, without a day off, to make Dilbert a success. There's no way I would have done that much work just to earn an average income. That would have been irrational. I had easier options. I think a reasonable person can dislike capitalism and wish for a more socialist world where art is free for all takers. But a reasonable person can't expect that a socialist world would produce nearly as much art. That's bat shit thinking. I invite all bat shit thinkers to reiterate my point that free downloads might help unknown bands, and act as if I didn't already address that exception. You are also invited to point out the fact that some middle men and some artists make more money than you do, and should be punished. (Bonus points for inserting "WA-WA-WA!!") Go. -------------------- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070424/9967ce66/attachment.html From jeebesh at sarai.net Tue Apr 24 18:42:06 2007 From: jeebesh at sarai.net (Jeebesh Bagchi) Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2007 18:42:06 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Film Studies, Film Practice and Asian Cinema: Points in Re-Connection Message-ID: <7734C0FD-525E-44B4-8C38-85666F400903@sarai.net> dear all, This is an excellent essay that is trying to reflect on the transformation that is brought about in teaching Film Studies after the expansion of the "culture of the digital copy". best jeebesh ========================================================= Film Studies, Film Practice and Asian Cinema: Points in Re-Connection[1] Moinak Biswas Department of Film Studies Jadavpur University i. These reflections are prompted by the new cinephilia that is emerging across cities in India. I have in mind the small groups forming in Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Chennai, and in smaller cities and towns, around the LCD projector and the DVD player, holding screenings of select films, often accompanied by discussions. The DVDs come from lending libraries and private collections, copy culture providing the basis to the creation of resource. I have had the opportunity to participate in discussions at a few such screenings recently. They seem to be a reincarnation of the film society in the digital era. The film society had its origins in India in 1947, reached its peak in the 1970s, and went into a steady decline in the mid-1980s. If video played a major role in that decline it is the DVD which is bringing it back to a new life from the ashes. It is, of course, a new life, and therefore, different in its promise. The composition of the groups itself is different, connected as it is to virtual societies on the Web, linked to home viewing facilities that were not available to the earlier film society members, smaller in size, and based more or personal acquaintance and friendship. As it so happens, at the moment, Asian Cinema forms a central focus of excitement in these fledgling societies. Interest in Iran was already deep when the activity took off, and Wong Kar-wai was already a favourite from the East. Then came the discovery of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tsai Ming-liang, Edward Yang, Jia Zhangke, Kim Ki-duk, et al. I am calling the excitement around the encounter with these filmmakers cinephilia in the old sense. There is a fascination for the possibilities of cinema that these films are bringing back. There is a part in the appreciation that is critical of the fact that we do not expect Indian film industry to produce such films. It is analytical in the sense that it tries to grasp the artistic processes at work. And then, it is a critical education in the way it tries to connect the techniques back to the act of filmmaking, often feeding into an interest in making films, into the increasingly common dream, fostered by digital formats, of the viewer turning into an image- maker some day. The interest in technique is always evident in the way young viewers discover possibilities of cinema, but there is enough reason to see it also as a fascination with challenging material. Take, for example, the passages of non-action that characterize much of the cinema coming from the practitioners mentioned above - those wordless durations where action is stripped of its dramatic content to a degree that often pushes screen reality beyond its imaginary wholeness, towards a registration of bare space and time. I am choosing this thematic-stylistic device since it has historically characterized many attempts of deviation from the norm in cinema. It was once a recognizable mark of the contemplative and defiant form, for instance, in the European cinema of the 1960s and 70s. It has been part of the celluloid cinephilia to appreciate the barren places of Antonioni, the camera writing over space in Mizoguchi, the near ridiculous moments of anticipation in Jim Jarmusch, or the withdrawal of movement in Mani Kaul. It was also part of the viewer's education to come to terms with the dead moments in various ‘new wave’ styles. One remembers how, later on, Gilles Deleuze devised a nomenclature for these moments in cinema, and brought out their deeper significance for thought in the twentieth century. It is intriguing to see the new cinephile learning to take delight in the same interruptions in the standardized system of pleasure. The logic of the action-less passage can connect up with a range of ruptures through which new speech emerges in cinema, through which cinema dares to speak in a different language. It strikes correspondence with an interruption in the suture of on-screen and off-screen space, of which Kiarostami and Hou are the new masters. The technique may lend itself to rediscovery, but its function has to be different each time at the level of the content. Jia Zhangke, for example, inserts stillness in the very heart of the story of the modernizing miracle of China. For him it is another time, hidden in the heart of a province; but he feels it is precisely what should be presented as the time of the contemporary, not the capitalist time of growth. His criticism of the Fifth Generation's turn to the past and period pieces[2] is visible in the way he withdraws from action and the dramatic organization of space. The withdrawal makes it possible to figure the story of a systematic erasure of people and life- worlds. As the young cinephile in India receives films like Unknown Pleasures and Platform does she think of the daily experience of our provinces, urban fringes and suburbia that is almost never articulated in our mainstream cinema? Does she feel the same sense of absence as she watches the immobilized gangsters traveling across the city borders in Hou's Goodbye South, Goodbye? The strategic function of immobility is not necessarily only to provide a critical access to the contemporary. A film like The Puppetmaster ( Hou Hsiao-hsien) reveals how cinema can achieve the difficult task of positioning itself between the past and the present by using the same technique. Goodbye Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming- liang) captures by the same method the emptiness invading cinema itself, in the shape of a theatre abandoned by the audience, in the compulsion to hand everything over to the past before it is time. One is always prompted to think of such things as more than technique because of this iterability, their renewed and repeated use across films, and their shifting effects. The range of possibilities organized around a single technical cluster could well present a legitimate point about the content we in India do not explore. The theme of homosexuality, for example, has found its way into our popular cinema. These are issues 'taken up' by films and remain extricable from them as issues. And then there are our serious films dealing with marital difficulties and physical disabilities. What must be a reinvigorating experience for the new cinephile is that something like homosexuality not only crosses the borders of chic and safe-play in a film like Tsai's The River, but the way the film opens itself to the unknown possibilities of cinema by placing the contingent sexual encounter between the father and the son without the justification of plot or character. The technique of immobility develops into a form in the proper sense as it bounces off these critical moments rather than follow a logic of succession. What it does in a film like The River is to clear space for a reconsideration of ideas that sustain our sense of reality. Rey Chow, in an essay on The River, calls this 'discursivity in production'. She thinks the stillness and non-decidability of the film helps a discursive scattering[3]. If, in its attempt to appreciate a technique like this, the new cinephilia reconnects with the older one one need not be alarmed about the return of dead paradigms. What we witness in the artistic adventure of the new Asian cinema is an ability to speak to the rich and varied history of world cinema. I am reminded of the way Fredric Jameson read Edward Yang's Terrorizer in 1992 in his 'Remapping Taipei', placing it side by side with Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, and saw the formal dynamics of the film, its re- capture of the symptoms of an urban subjectivity, as a mirror in which modernism could discover truths about its own career[4]. One could think of the moment in What Time Is It There? when Jean-Pierre Leaud hands his phone number in a chit of paper to Chen Shiang-chyi - a tribute from the young appearing on screen as a gesture of generosity from the old. The film stops at unexpected moments to remember Francois Truffaut's 400 Blows. Tsai says in an interview that Leaud wanted lines to speak in that scene, but he didn't want him to. He also says how, when the film was shown in Paris, the audience broke into applause the moment the silent Jean-Pierre Leaud, the most remembered face of the young from the Nouvelle Vague, appeared on the screen[5]. An applause of the cinephile, it was occasioned, one would like to think, by the connection that Paris established with Taipei at that moment. ii. It is difficult for the Film Studies we practice to echo these moments of gratitude. To repeat the point about the connection between the new cinephilia and film practice, the technique that I mention above cannot be a part of the standard cinema, Hollywood, Bombay or Chennai. As someone associated with academic Film Studies in India, I see a chasm opening up once more between our work and the cinephile's engagement at this point. It is not the first time, since Film Studies began by marking a distance from the existing cinephile discourse. The latter was a discourse conducted under the aegis of the film society movement. The first generation of Indian Film Studies practitioners all came from that background. The new scholarship they represented became visible in the late 1980s. Film Studies soon found itself ensconced in the academia, the first full fledged Department with a postgraduate curriculum was to be launched at Jadavpur University in 1993. I have been asked here to speak from the experience of being associated with the Department; hence you will forgive me this quick overview based on personal impressions. A divergence from the film art discourse was necessary, we thought, to open a domain proper to the historical-cultural understanding of film. The auteurist bias, the focus on select films, prevented historical investigation, re-produced notions of art and the artist which appeared problematic in the face of the challenges from Theory. The absence of any historical account of the institution of Indian cinema, for example, was obviously a product of the rarefied 'appreciation' approach to film that the existing discourse had. I come from a city which had an active film society movement, and it was also home to some of the most prominent practitioners of alternative cinema in India, including Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak. Film Studies there had a paradoxical circumstance of birth. It was possible to motivate the university to launch a Department of Film Studies in the face of skepticism from the academic old guard because of the prestige film culture enjoyed among the intellectuals; on the other hand, soon upon the formation of the Department it became clear that the writers and organizers belonging to the film society culture did not identify themselves with our work. That they found our business esoteric was only one side of the problem; they also found it baffling that we shifted our attention from the art of cinema entirely to its culture, and therefore, also got occupied with a kind of cinema which the film society movement was launched to debunk. I do not have to tell this audience about the benefits of that departure. If that justification is at all needed I should rather be arguing with my disappointed friends from the film societies. I have been asked to reflect on the experience of the Department rather than tell the story of its environmental adaptation. I would like to speak a little about the internal effects of that adaptation though. When we formulated the syllabi for the Department, we were enjoined to strike a balance between Film Studies and its non-academic neighbour discourses. In teaching Hollywood and film theory we were drawn naturally to the seventies film theory and the attending historical research; in our courses on the world cinema schools (Europe, Latin America, Japan) we leant on a selection of critical texts that precede and run parallel to film theory. The courses that dealt with Indian cinema and cultural theory had to make a quick connection with what was then an incipient scholarship of Film Studies orientation in India. This bricolage of tools was sought to be put within a framing Film Studies discourse, which, after film theory washed ashore and receded, formed a closer alliance with Cultural Studies. As Film Studies began its productive investigation of the institution of cinema in India it had to deflect the focus onto culture. I would like to remember here that this does not necessarily demand a turn to the 'category of popular culture', since the new scholarship promised to analyze the processes of cultural production of all kinds of cinema, not only the mainstream popular. So far as a focus on production was retained, it held the promise of taking us back to film practice, the uncovered weave of cultural composition offering an engagement with films not only wider but richer than auteur-based or close textual discussion . But let us remember that there was no radical content to this struggle to wean away criticism from art to culture, it was precisely what the new economy of culture demanded. Academic Film Studies began its career in India at a time when the state was about to withdraw its support to alternative cinema, a certain cultural project of post-independence modernity was coming to an end; the state's initiatives in culture was being handed over to the market. It also coincided with the onset of new television and the implication of cinema in a new audiovisual matrix, the beginning of the 'end of cinema as we knew it'. To the Film Studies scholar the alternative cinema in the feature film sector will simply become unavailable. It would not be inaccurate to say that that the Cultural Studies turn became recognizable in the increasing interest Film Studies began to take in the broad area of reception, and the increasing investment in the contemporary. Once again, I assume that I do not need to mention the important results of that project. The work on the changing exhibition modes and new forms of dissemination, for instance, is one of the most exciting areas of current research. This turn, however, made the rift between two approaches to cinema clearer. In the teaching situation, we do not necessarily produce scholarly material, we introduce them. We need a somewhat finished body of work to take to the students; and therefore, often move at a lag with research. But sometimes, you would agree, that little gap forces a choice on us, which has its own benefits given the occasional hazards of being fully contemporary to the contemporary. And one is not always sharing a discourse among peers in the class; the students have their own reality to present. We have often felt that the students, exposed only to Indian and American mainstream cinema, no longer having the support of the film society, should first know another cinema exists. They should not be deprived of the immersion in a cinema that has made us relate to the world in a new way, revealed the immense potentials of sound and image, provided incitement to thought, have changed us in small and important ways. One had to invoke a discourse that did not overlap with the new film scholarship in India in order to keep a dialogue on with Ozu or Oshima, Bunuel or Renoir, Ghatak or Glauber Rocha, even as one talked about the politics of popular pleasure. The Japanese critic Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto says in an essay that the reason Japan doesn't have Film Studies is the study of cinema there never took off from the older humanities framework in the direction of Cultural Studies[6]. What happens when Film Studies co-exists in the university with other humanities disciplines? While the literature courses at Jadavpur have over the years incorporated parts of our content, Film Studies in its turn has been reminded of the usefulness of the methods they work with, which may not belong to Cultural Studies. I would say criticism is at stake at the juncture where we stand. Criticism demands a distance, a non-identity with the object. Film Studies in its current shape in India, tends to lose contact with criticism in that sense, committed as it is to what is, to the description of the given. In its reading of cultural symptoms it often resembles the hybrid body of the popular cinematic frame it encounters, collapsing the framing gap with the object. We run the risk of ending up placing a trust in the industry as the only creative source since it defines our area of operation. In that sense, retaining the framing gap would mean keeping alive the reflection on the possibilities of cinema, connecting back to creation of films. Retaining the gap would also mean taking a detour through other cinemas, those that are close to us, and yet distant. After all, a trend within Cultural Studies, by isolating the elements of artistic production and laying bare their strategic and historical functions, their diverse affiliations, sought to open the way for their renewal. Film Studies, especially in the space it shares with students, may need a conversation with the cinephile at this point, who is exploring the alternatives that exist next door, using them as the 'outside' that every criticism needs. It is not as if the industrial film in India does not establish links of its own kind with film scholarship. The smartness of contemporary Indian cinema shows how it has already incorporated a certain critical discourse about itself and turned it into an advantage. Why shouldn't criticism also attempt to make a connection with the films that are about to come, maybe through a process in which our filmmakers join the collaborative network in East Asia that sustains the new Asian cinema. The cinephile's viewing activity is connected by an imaginary thread to the films that many of the young, not content with what our cinema has to offer, would like to make. Shouldn't Film Studies also produce accounts of existing films that remember those that are made in our heads? ----------------------- [1] This paper was prepared for ‘Asian Cinema: Towards a Research and Teaching Agenda’, International Conference organized by Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, in February, 2007. [2] 'Capturing a Transforming Reality', interview with Michael Berry, in Berry, Speaking in Images, New York, 2005 [3] 'A Pain in the Neck, A Scene of "Incest", and Other Enigmas of an Allegorical Cinema, Tsai Ming-liang's The River', New Centennial Review 4.1 (2004) [4] Jameson in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Cinema and Space in the World System, London, 1992 [5] '"My Films Reflect My Living Situation": An Interview with Tsai Ming-liang on Film Spaces, Audiences, and Distribution', by Sujen Wang and Chris Fujiwara, positions: east asia cultures critique, 14.1 (2006) [6] See Yoshimoto, 'The University, Disciplines, National Identity. Why is There No Film Studies in Japan?', South Atlantic Quarterly (2000) From anujbhuwania at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 19:49:29 2007 From: anujbhuwania at gmail.com (Anuj Bhuwania) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:49:29 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] A Supreme Court Judge on caste in judiciary In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi, In the context of the breathtaking arrogance displayed by Justice Arijit Passayat of the Supreme Court in refusing to reconsider its erroneous order injuncting reservation for OBCs in Central educational institutions, and the rather different response from Chief Justice Balakrishnan yesterday, I think its high time we started discussing the caste character of the higher judiciary itself. Of course, broader social representation is not necessarily a pancea for the "judicial emergency" that increasingly seems to prevail in India. To initiate a discussion on this issue, I am giving a link below to an extract from an astonishing SC judgment, in the SCAORA case, the famous case where the SC gave itself the power to appoint judges of the higher judiciary in India. The extract is a separate concurring judgment filed by Justice Ratnavel Pandian. Pandian cited data regarding SC/ST and OBC judges in the High Courts and the Supreme Court, and reproduced them in his judgement to make his point. (By the way, J. Pandian is the same judge who gave the majority opinion upholding the constitutionality of TADA) . Apart from this, I am not aware of any recent data and this too is dated 1993, compiling the caste make-up of the higher judiciary in India. http://www.altlawforum.org/Resources/judicial_nineties/Pandian Anuj From anujbhuwania at gmail.com Wed Apr 25 21:34:59 2007 From: anujbhuwania at gmail.com (Anuj Bhuwania) Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:34:59 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] A Supreme Court Judge on caste in judiciary In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Sorry, the earlier link I had sent did not work. Its now available at: http://www.altlawforum.org/Resources/judicial_nineties/pandian.rtf Anuj On 4/25/07, Anuj Bhuwania wrote: > Hi, > > In the context of the breathtaking arrogance displayed by Justice > Arijit Passayat of the Supreme Court in refusing to reconsider its > erroneous order injuncting reservation for OBCs in Central educational > institutions, and the rather different response from Chief Justice > Balakrishnan yesterday, I think its high time we started discussing > the caste character of the higher judiciary itself. Of course, broader > social representation is not necessarily a pancea for the "judicial > emergency" that increasingly seems to prevail in India. > > To initiate a discussion on this issue, I am giving a link below to an > extract from an astonishing SC judgment, in the SCAORA case, the > famous case where the SC gave itself the power to appoint judges of > the higher judiciary in India. The extract is a separate concurring > judgment filed by Justice Ratnavel Pandian. Pandian cited data > regarding SC/ST and OBC judges in the High Courts and the Supreme > Court, and reproduced them in his judgement to make his point. (By > the way, J. Pandian is the same judge who gave the majority opinion > upholding the constitutionality of TADA) . Apart from this, I am not > aware > of any recent data and this too is dated 1993, compiling the caste > make-up of the higher judiciary in India. > > http://www.altlawforum.org/Resources/judicial_nineties/Pandian > > Anuj > From rajasekaranab at scopeknowledge.com Thu Apr 26 15:57:41 2007 From: rajasekaranab at scopeknowledge.com (Rajasekaran) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 15:57:41 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] A Supreme Court Judge on caste in judiciary In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <20070426102017.4723D28DA3E@mail.sarai.net> The time has come for reservation in the higher judiciary. Some of their recent remarks(can't you wait for another year)only shows their caste consiousness. Remember the famous note of President Narayanan, but then the upper caste media made a big issue of it, he was only stating the obvious. Out of the 750 and odd judges, judges belonging to SC/ST may be less than 25(guessing, may be someone has to find out) ab.rajasekaran Disclaimer: This message is being sent from Scope e-Knowledge Center P Ltd. and may contain information which is confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message and any attachments without retaining a copy. Any unauthorized use of the content of this message can expose the responsible party to civil and/or criminal penalties, and may constitute a more serious offence. Further the company does not accept liability for any errors, omissions, viruses or computer problems experienced as a result of this transmission . If you have received this message in error, notice is hereby given that no representation,contract or other binding obligation shall be created by this e-mail. From mail at shivamvij.com Thu Apr 26 00:32:31 2007 From: mail at shivamvij.com (Shivam Vij) Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 00:32:31 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] [Reader-list] A Supreme Court Judge on caste in judiciary In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9c06aab30704251202o2bee5ff5w2c9d0d434688fda7@mail.gmail.com> By the way, Pandian is now the Chairperson of the National Commission for Backward Classes, the Constitution body as far as OBC reservations are concerned. Strangely, Pandian and the NCBC have not been speaking at all in the current controversy, mute as if they were deaf, and Pandian refuses to meet any journalists. On 4/25/07, Anuj Bhuwania wrote: > > Hi, > > In the context of the breathtaking arrogance displayed by Justice > Arijit Passayat of the Supreme Court in refusing to reconsider its > erroneous order injuncting reservation for OBCs in Central educational > institutions, and the rather different response from Chief Justice > Balakrishnan yesterday, I think its high time we started discussing > the caste character of the higher judiciary itself. Of course, broader > social representation is not necessarily a pancea for the "judicial > emergency" that increasingly seems to prevail in India. > > To initiate a discussion on this issue, I am giving a link below to an > extract from an astonishing SC judgment, in the SCAORA case, the > famous case where the SC gave itself the power to appoint judges of > the higher judiciary in India. The extract is a separate concurring > judgment filed by Justice Ratnavel Pandian. Pandian cited data > regarding SC/ST and OBC judges in the High Courts and the Supreme > Court, and reproduced them in his judgement to make his point. (By > the way, J. Pandian is the same judge who gave the majority opinion > upholding the constitutionality of TADA) . Apart from this, I am not > aware > of any recent data and this too is dated 1993, compiling the caste > make-up of the higher judiciary in India. > > http://www.altlawforum.org/Resources/judicial_nineties/Pandian > > Anuj > _________________________________________ > reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. > Critiques & Collaborations > To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with > subscribe in the subject header. > To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list > List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> -- http://www.shivamvij.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/attachments/20070426/93b3dbd5/attachment.html From prabhuram at gmail.com Mon Apr 30 11:25:36 2007 From: prabhuram at gmail.com (Prabhu Ram) Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:25:36 +0530 Subject: [Commons-Law] Small Indian biotech companies make it big with off-patent drugs In-Reply-To: <68752c9f0704292254n6e960caao447fb34e741f1df8@mail.gmail.com> References: <68752c9f0704292254n6e960caao447fb34e741f1df8@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <68752c9f0704292255q31349286q7dce41227423b0be@mail.gmail.com> Small players make it big with off-patent drugs P B Jayakumar / Mumbai April 30, 2007 Competing with established biotech companies in India such as Wockhardt, Biocon and Reliance Life Sciences, small biotech companies such as Zenotech, BV Biocorp and Intas Biopharma are likely to emerge as major Indian players in the field of biogeneric drugs, copycat versions of off-patent biotech drugs. The biogenerics market is expected to grow to $25 billion in Europe and $30 billion in the US by 2015 as many existing blockbuster biotech drugs are going off-patent in the coming years. BV Biocorp, the biotech drug research arm of the Pune-based poultry major Venkateswara Hatcheries (VH) group, is close to launching three biogeneric drugs in the global markets even ahead of players such as Reliance Life Sciences. While biogenerics of Reliance Life Science's recently acquired a UK facility, GeneMedix, Wockhardt, which has developed six biogenerics, is yet to decide on launching its product in the US market. "Our biogenerics are in the therapeutic areas of cancer, arthritis and cardiovascular diseases. Two of the drugs are undergoing phase-III clinical trials in the US and India and the third drug will soon enter the phase-III trials. The drugs have shown excellent results so far and could be commercialised within a year," said O P Singh, chief executive officer, VH group. BV Biocorp is also setting up three plants for drug manufacturing with an investment of Rs 43 crore at the Rajiv Gandhi Biotech Park at Hinjewadi and at the special economic zone in Pune. "We may set up two to three plants depending on the requirement or may even opt for the inorganic route to scale up the production facilities depending on the demand for products," he said. Intas Biopharmaceuticals, another emerging player, already markets indigenously developed biopharmaceutical products such as recombinant human Granulocyte Colony Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) under the brand name of Neukine, Erythropoietin (EPO) under the brand name of Erykine and Epofit and Interrferon Alfa 2b as Intalfa in India. Six more products are in the pipeline and the company hopes to launch one to two products every year in the coming years, according to Mani Iyer, director, Intas Biopharmaceuticals. The generic opportunity for EPO (for chemotherapy and renal failure), GCSF (prescribed to make more white blood cells during cancer treatment), Interferon Alpha (for Hepatitis C and renal failure), Interferon Beta (to treat multiple sclerosis, a chronic disease that affects central nervous system) and human insulin, together with a current market size of $7200 million, is estimated to have a market size of $7 billion alone in Europe by 2015. The European Union has already enforced guidelines for allowing biogenerics and the US is actively considering to approve marketing of biogenerics. Zenotech, which developed its own versions of cancer drugs AGM-CSF and G-CSF, has three other biogenerics under development. The company also has developed generic rituximab, a biotech drug used to treat a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Zenotech is also developing interleukins (IL-2), used in cancer treatment to stimulate white blood cells. The company, which sold its 10 per cent stake to Ranbaxy, has teamed up with the same pharma major to market its products in the global markets.