Indian patent review withdrawn after spicy plagiarism

"You might care little for this, but I find the irony too amusing to ignore", says Riz Mohammad when drawing the IPKat's attention to an article on The Hindu by Ravi Sharma and Sara Hiddleston, "Mashelkar committee on Patent Law withdraws report; seeks more time", citing "technical inaccuracy and plagiarism" as reasons.

Right: plagiarism - a jumbo-sized problem for authors and scholars

A further three months have been requested from the Indian government for putting the 56-page report to rights. The report, prepared by a committee led by Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, examined two TRIPs-related controversies:
* whether it was legitimate to limit the grant of patents for pharmaceutical substances to new chemical entities or new medical entities involving one or more inventive steps only and

* whether microorganisms could be excluded from patent protection.
The committee took over a year and a half to reach its conclusions. However, it appears that some of the text of the report was copied verbatim from a November 2005 paper (Limiting the Patentability of Pharmaceutical Inventions and Micro-organisms: A TRIPs Compatibility Review) that was authored by scholar and Spicy IP blogger Shamnad Basheer of the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre, University of Oxford. Shamnad's research was published by the Intellectual Property Institute, a charitable organisation that encourages and commissions IP research.

Below: a succinct summary of plagiarism, from politicsnj.com

On the subject of the ethics of IP infringement, readers might like to reflect upon the following and draw their own conclusions. The article in The Hindu states:

"We have identified eight to ten lines that have been extracted verbatim from Basheer's paper. As a scientist I see this as not a good practice. In keeping with the highest and best ethical practices we want to withdraw the report". ...

Asked whether the committee would now like to rewrite the report or just change the "eight to ten lines" that have been plagiarised, Dr. Mashelkar said that "that depended on the members of the committee"".
If you want to read Shamnad Basheer's IPI report in full, and not just the plagiarised bits, you can order it from the IPI (click here and scroll down to 106 for details).
Indian patent review withdrawn after spicy plagiarism Indian patent review withdrawn after spicy plagiarism Reviewed by Jeremy on Thursday, February 22, 2007 Rating: 5

1 comment:

  1. NATCO v. Shamnad Basheer CS(OS) 2475/2012- Counsel for the plaintiff submits that the defendant has been publishing derogatory and disparaging material primarily relating to the proceedings of a suit bearing CS(OS) No. 2279/2009 filed by M/s. Bristol Myers Squibb against the plaintiff. Counsel also submits that the said matter is listed before Hon’ble Mr. Justice V.K. Jain on 18.9.2012. List the matter before the same Bench on 21.8.2012, subject to orders of Judge In-charge (Original Side).

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.