THE cabinet has approved the national IPRs policy on May 12 2016. It is India’s ‘first of its kind” policy which covers all the forms of intellectual property and follows a common set of principles to govern the rights of intellectual property owners without bothering to pursue the concerns of development. In the recent past, India has been under pressure from the US government under Section 301. India has been asked to strengthen the intellectual property regime beyond TRIPS Agreement to which India reluctantly acceded to in order to be member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

WHO is Satoshi Nakamoto and why should we even bother knowing who he is? Nakamoto is the pseudonym of the person who created the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, who till this week, was just a name. Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist and entrepreneur, who had earlier also been linked to Nakamoto, stepped forward this week with the claim he is indeed the iconic Nakamoto and responsible for starting Bitcoin.

EVER since the installation of the BJP government, India has gone out of its way to ingratiate itself with the United States. This trend has been particularly prominent in the case of intellectual property rights (patent rights in the case of medicines), an area where India and the US have traditionally held almost diametrically opposite views.

INDIA and the whole world has just witnessed the most horrible display of utter lack of concern for the environment by the Art of Living (AoL) foundation led by new-age guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar which organised a massive international cultural festival slap bang on the Yamuna floodplains in Delhi to commemorate 35 years of its functioning. The AOL organisers and its supporters at the highest echelons of the central government brazened out the storm of criticism by environmental groups, scientists, judicial bodies, large sections of the media and the general public.

LAST month, the Indian Patents Office released the revised Guidelines for Computer Related Invention (CRI Guidelines), which has finally aligned the Patents Office fully with the Indian Patents Act. This is the third time that software patents have been beaten back in India: the first with the Amendments to the Patents Act in 2005, the next, smuggling it in through the Patents Manual issued by the Patents Office, and this time, through the original CRI Guideline issued in August last year. Each time, these attempts have been beaten back.