Patent imbroglio

An imbroglio can be defined as a confused or complicated situation.
Motorola Mobility v. Apple Inc. was one of a series of lawsuits between technology companies Motorola Mobility and Apple Inc. In the year before Apple and Samsung began suing each other on most continents, and while Apple and High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC) were already embroiled in a patent fight, Motorola Mobility and Apple started a period of intense patent litigation. The Motorola-Apple patent imbroglio commenced with claims and cross-claims between the companies for patent infringement, and encompassed multiple venues in multiple countries as each party sought friendly forums for litigating its respective claims; the fight also included administrative law rulings as well as United States International Trade Commission (ITC) and European Commission involvement. In April 2012, the controversy centered on whether a FRAND license to a components manufacturer carries over to an equipment manufacturer incorporating the component into equipment, an issue not addressed in the Supreme Court’s default analysis using the exhaustion doctrine in Quanta v. LG Electronics. In June 2012, appellate judge Richard Posner dismissed the U.S. case with prejudice and the parties appealed the decision a month later.

Rice & IP: The ongoing Basmati imbroglio
Over the last year with the Monsanto-Nuziveedu dispute, India has witnessed one of its biggest IP disputes in the agricultural sector. The Basmati GI dispute also has huge implication but as I’m reminded, often, by several people, geographical indications (GI) do not qualify as IP. These disputes aside, we’ve also come across two other very interesting cases of green rice and IR8 celebrations.
Basmati rice – When did geography become an issue?
As we’ve written earlier on SpicyIP, there is a long running dispute between APEDA and the State of Madhya Pradesh (MP) on whether the Basmati GI should cover even MP. For its part, APEDA has argued strenuously against including MP on the grounds that basmati is confined to only 7 states located at or near the foothills of the Himalayas. The dispute is currently before the Madras High Court which is expected to answer some crucial questions on points of law. The main question of fact has been remanded to the GI Registry by the IPAB i.e. whether MP can qualify as an area which grows basmati. In a previous piece, I had speculated that it would difficult for MP to qualify as a basmati growing area because basmati is marketed as a rice grown at the foothills of the Himalayas and MP is too far away from the Himalayas to qualify.
However while researching on this basmati case for our forthcoming book, Sumathi and I came across some very interesting information after a LOT of digging around in a library. We’ve written a short piece for the November issue of Caravan based on a chapter in our forthcoming book. The interesting discovery that we made was that between 1979 and 2003 the law regulating the exporting of basmati rice never specified a geographical area within which the rice had to be grown. These regulations that we discovered were drafted initially under the Agricultural Produce (Grading and Marking) Act, 1937 by the Ministry of Agriculture and then replicated by the Ministry of Commerce under the powers delegated to it by the Export (Quality Control and Inspection) Act, 1963. The first set of rules are Export of Basmati Rice (Inspection Rules), 1980 and the second set of rules are Basmati Rice (Quality Control and Inspection) Rules, 1990. Both set of rules defined basmati in terms of length of grains, aroma etc. but never in terms of geographical growing area. The geographical area requirement came into being only with the Export of Basmati Rice (Quality Control and Inspection) Rules, 2003. This happened because of pressure from the EU to ensure better quality control norms while exporting basmati. This is when the Ministry introduced the Indo-Gangetic plains as the geographical region within which basmati was grown.
In conclusion if MP and its rice millers can prove that their basmati exports have been certified by the government of India under any of the export regulatory regimes from 1979, there is no reason to not recognise MP as a basmati growing area.