No pills for poor people? Understanding the disembowelment of India’s patent regime

The recent amendment to the Patent Act, 1970 brings India into full compliance with its obligations under the TRIPs Agreement, in particular allowing for product patents in the area of pharmaceuticals and agrichemicals. This amendment, the third to the 1970 Act, was characterised by a relatively muted rhetoric and a remarkable level of shared consensus amongst campaigners and critics. Focusing largely on domestic compulsions, as opposed to the global, the paper explores whether the shared consensus sets too narrow an agenda for patent reform. The paper suggests that the limits to implementing TRIPs are equally on account of ambivalence within the government with respect to intellectual property and the changing self- interest of sections of Indian pharma. Thus, despite a favourable international climate in the area of intellectual property (read Seattle, Cancun and Doha), the patent reform in India has been doubly constrained by the narrow agenda and domestic factors

Geneva rhetoric, national reality: implementing TRIPS obligations in Kenya

The article is about implementing obligations to article 27.3(b) of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. Using Kenya as a case study, the article seeks to explore how the latitude and space available in article 27.3(b) has been translated into the domestic architecture of law. At the TRIPS Council, Kenya locates article 27.3(b) in a wider frame of distribute justice using norms and principles in other multilateral agreements. However, its domestic law fails to reflect this rhetoric. As such, the latitude and space in article 27.3(b) was diminished by Kenya’s accession to UPOV

R&D Appropriability and Planned Obsolescence: Empirical Evidence from Wheat Breeding in the UK (1960-1995)

Plant breeders face a unique appropriation problem - plants are reproducible, genetic information is heritable and seeds can be multiplied. The paper uses indicators of varietal age as a proxy for durability to examine strategies of planned obsolescence. Using wheat breeding in the UK, evidence of strategies of planned obsolescence is confirmed. This is then corroborated with evidence of tendencies towards increased proliferation of varieties on the market and breeding strategies that focus on incremental productivity improvements (i.e. increased efficiency) and narrow and limited disease resistance (i.e. reduced durability).Planned Obsolescence, R&D appropriability, Innovation, Plant Breeding, Crop Production/Industries, L13, O31, Q10,

Geneva rhetoric, national reality : the political economy of introducing plant breeders' rights in Kenya

The article is about implementing obligations under Article 27.3(b) of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS). However, concerned with the fragmentation of international law in a globalised world, the article uses Kenya as a case study to interrogate the apparent choice and latitude in Article 27.3(b). At the TRIPS Council, Kenya has sought to locate Article 27.3(b) within a wider frame by adroitly norm-borrowing, and it canvassed for integrating norms and principles from other multilateral agreements into TRIPS. Yet, when introducing plant breeders' rights into domestic law, Kenya fails to either explore the apparent latitude or deliver on its rhetoric in Geneva. I explain this decoupling between Geneva rhetoric (ritual) and domestic law (behaviour) as another symptom of what Steinberg [(2002), ‘In the Shadow of Law or Power? Consensus-Based Bargaining and Outcomes in the GATT/WTO’, International Organization, 56 (2), pp. 339–74)] characterises as ‘organised hypocrisy’ of the World Trade Organisation. In demonstrating that fragmentation in global legal architecture may not automatically emerge in domestic law, the article draws out the significance of attending to a domestic political economy of law-making

Context and ambiguity: a comment on amending India's patent act

In implementing its patent-related obligations to the TRIPS Agreement, India decided to use the optional additional transitional provisions in Article 65(4). Thus, delaying the introduction of product patents in exempt technologies, notably pharmaceuticals, till 1 January 2005. Ostensibly, this gave it the opportunity to exploit changing circumstances to and emergent views on TRIPS-implementation; in particular exploring new interpretations to residual flexibility in TRIPS and any continuing legal ambiguity in TRIPS obligations. In terms of the latter, the Panel Report in Canada – Patent Protection of Pharmaceutical Products is pertinent in having exhibited rare reticence in stepping back from defining the principle of non-discrimination in Article 27(1), TRIPS Agreement. While maintaining legal ambiguity, this reticence also provides space for law-making and regulatory diversity. The article reviews the three amendments to India’s Patent Act, 1970 and finds mixed use of residual flexibility and some evidence of efforts to explore legal ambiguity. Thus, despite a favourable climate to TRIPS implementation and an active transnational access to medicine campaign, legislators in India have demonstrated a degree of caution. The article concludes that this caution is best explained in terms of deepening ambivalence concerning intellectual property within the government and the changing economic interests of sections of Indian pharma

The supreme court judgment : lawmaking in the south

Bringing together the various aspects of and issues related to the recent Supreme Court judgment rejecting Novartis's patent for Glivec, this writeup introduces a set of articles discussing pharmaceutical patents and their evergreening, Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act, as well as the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement. Even as it does all of this, the write-up places the observations in a wider context that tells a story of lawmaking in the south