Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons may solve the territorial issue of Patent Exhaustion

Patent Exhaustion is also known as first sale doctrine. Under the doctrine, the rights of the patent holders become exhausted after the sale. Therefore, the patent holder cannot sue anyone for the infringement for the sold patent. The drawback of the doctrine is that it did not clearly define the territorial status of the doctrine. Even the Court delivers the conflicting rulings in the territorial dispute. Therefore, the doctrine should be analyzed to set up a standard of territory status in patent exhaustion case. However, the recent arguments in the case of Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. may find out permanent solutions on the territorial issue of Patent Exhaustion.

Kirtsaeng, a Thai national resold some books in the USA and earned millions of dollars. These books were purchased by his family from the Thailand bookstore.   When these activities of Kirtsaeng were detected by John Wiley & Sons, a reputed textbook publisher of the USA, Wiley filed a suit against Kirtsaeng on the ground of copyright infringement. Kirsten defended him arguing that the books that he sold in America were published under the license of John Wiley & Sons to its Asian subsidiary. Therefore, John Wiley & Sons could not sue anyone for reselling the text books under 106(a), 602(a) and 109(a) of the US copyright acts. The case raised two issues related to provisions of US copyright acts. The first one is whether a copyright owner can file infringement of copyright suit against anyone after the legal sale of his work to another one. The second one is whether the permission is required to import the material in US if anyone legally acquires abroad the copyright of a material from US.

Both the parties seek the justice under the provision of section 109 of copyright act. The section 109 has mentioned the limitations on exclusive rights of copyright owners. According to the section 109, “Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106(3), the owner of a particular copy or phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that copy or phonorecord”. Kirtsaeng argued that as the books were published abroad under the license from John Wiley & Sons to its Asian subsidiary, reselling of the books in USA are exempted from punishment. In their counter argument, Wiley & Sons rejected the claim of exemption from punishment mentioning that the US Copyright Act is not applicable in Asia. Therefore, Kirtsaeng will not get impunity under the section 109 (a) of US Copyright Law. The District Court gives its verdict in favor of John Wiley & Sons imposing a damage charge of $600,000. The second circuit also affirmed the verdict.

Now, Supreme Court has heard the oral arguments of the case. The case has attracted the attention of the people related to copyright and patent acts. Both the parties had cited the examples of previous judgments of similar type of cases. The center of the attraction was the financial importance of 109(a) section; the rights of copyright holders to sell the copyrighted work at lower price in the foreign countries in the regime of globalization. A decision explicitly authorizing the importation into this country of low-cost foreign versions of copyrighted works would directly undermine the ability of content providers to maintain high prices for domestic versions of the works.

<p> For more information on copyright, patent and intellectual property rights, please contact:  <a href="http://www.lexprotector.com/blog/2012/09/20/trademark-protection-in-india/">Lex Protector</a></p>

Is “Biological Diversity Act” creating obstacle to the research of Indian Scientists?

Multinational Companies, backed by the powerful nations, are regularly stealing the traditional knowledge of India for their financial gain. India is not getting any legitimate compensation from those Companies. The first world countries are granting patents on traditional medicines of India are causing a great concern to the Indian Government.  According to the WTO regulations, it may be mentioned as bio piracy. Some examples of bio piracy are granting patents of turmeric, neem and basamati rice by European and American states. However, Government of India has revoked the patent of some Indian items through their appeals in the courts of various countries. The revocation of all the patents based on the traditional knowledge is not the feasible solution of the problem. Therefore, India Government felt the need of creating a database of non patent traditional knowledge.

India created its “Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL)” in 2001. After creation of the “TKDL”, a controversial issue has come into the limelight. The scientists of the Government Organizations such as “Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR)”, “Defense Research & Development Organization” are complaining that their research papers are either rejected or pending on the grounds of their findings contained in “TKDL”. The main reason of it is the Section 6 of draconian “Biological Diversity Act” and lack of innovative ideas among the “Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR)” scientists who control “TKDL”.

We hope that the Government of India will relax some of the clauses of “Biological Diversity Act”, so that our scientists can get their patents in a fair way.   

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Fingerprint recognition is the most popular system of biometric identification. The cost effective device, accuracy and the unique properties of fingerprint are the main reasons of popularity. However, fingerprint distortion is a major problem of fingerprint identification system. The scientists are trying hard to solve this problem. The article proposes a new technology of fixing the problem of distorted fingerprint.
In the digital age, automatic scanner determines the similarity between the two fingerprint images comparing the patterns of friction ridges and local distribution of the minutiae points. Therefore, the first step of fingerprint identification is capturing the images of friction ridges. In the traditional process, fingerprint image is captured by pressing the finger on a solid surface like prism or scanner. Uniform pressure on the scanner surface will produce a perfect image of fingerprint. However, if the finger applies non uniform pressure on the surface, a non linear distortion will occur. Besides this, distortions also occur due to damaged finger, oil and dirt on the finger. Elimination of non-linear distortion is a formidable challenge to the forensic experts.
Various methods are used to counter the non-linear distortion problem of fingerprint identification. Some fingerprint scanners measure the applied force and creates algorithm on the basis of applied pressure. This system does not work when the distortion is too large. Most of them are based on the algorithm of non-linear distortion. However, these methods are appropriate for comparing the non-distorted and distorted fingerprints. This process does not produce good result in the case of matching two distorted fingerprints.
Fingerprint matching is done by comparing the ridge structures of two and more fingerprint impressions and their spatial distribution of minutiae points. To counter the problem of distorted fingerprint impression, the scientists developed a device that can capture the three dimension (3D) image of friction ridges. In this system, an optical 3Dcamera system generates a high quality image by covering a bigger part of finger skin. 3D optical has introduced touch less imaging system and it provides more details about fingerprint ridges. The system uses the technology of capturing the image without contact between the finger and a solid surface. Therefore, the possibility of deformed image has been substantially reduced. The key feature of the technique is to transform the topological pattern of fingerprint into coordinate system. This allows the forensic experts to unwrap the distorted fingerprint and create an authentic representation of fingerprintimpressions.

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