Troubling the "national" and "international" through intellectual property disputes

Keywords: national, international, law, intellectual property
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 3

Abstract

What can disputes over an anti-cancer drug and “course packs”—a colloquial term for compilations of photocopied excerpts from books used in graduate education in India—tell us about the spaces of, and relationship between the national and the international? In this paper, I discuss two landmark disputes over intellectual property in India: 1) The Glivec case involved divergent claims about the novelty of Glivec, a drug that cures Chronic Myeloid Leukemia. The primary question before the law: was Glivec a new drug meriting a patent, or was it a slightly modified version of an already patented drug and thereby ineligible for a separate patent? The answer to this question would determine when generic and cheaper versions of Novartis’ exorbitantly priced medicine would be available in India. 2) The Delhi University photocopy case saw three international publishing giants filed a lawsuit against a modest copy shop in the premises of Delhi University. The shop was accused of copyright infringement for selling course packs, with the publishers seeking $1 million in damages. Both cases involved encounters between international and Indian laws on intellectual property; verdicts in both were viewed as resistance to legal imperialism, as victories of the Global South against the Global North. My analysis troubles this neatly divided geopolitical language. I argue that the international and the national are neither distinct, nor strictly oppositional spaces or scales. Rather they are understood as much in terms of mutual constitution, asymmetrical interpenetration, successful/failed transplants and closures, as they are in terms of resistance.