[Ip-health] Indian Express: Plagiarism in his panels report, Mashelkar tells Govt to withdraw it

[dshanker@deakin.edu.au]

Dear Chan Park
You have been doing wonderful work. I heard about the withdrawal of
the report by R. D. Mashelkar today from the newspapers. The
withdrawal appears to be more mischievous than the report itself. The
revert has basically been prepared by the lawyers for multinationals
with members of the Technical Expert Group on Patent Law such as
Govardhan Mehata, Asis Datta, NR Madhava Menon and Moolchand Sharma
just signing the paper. Prof. NR Madhava Menon and Moolchand Sharma
apparently owe their membership of the Technical Committee to Mr.
Kamal nath, the Minster for Commerce, who comes from Bhopal like them.
Mr. Mashelkar would be acting nothing more than a coordinator with the
actual people such as the multinational paid lawyers in preparation of
the report. Plagiarizing is not as trifling or trivial as Mashelkar is
trying to make it out. Plagiarizing is not an offence as such as small
copying amount to fair use under any copyright act but plagiarizing by
a government servant, particularly in collusion with the foreign
industry amounts to misappropriation of government?s fund by
government servant and then it becomes a major criminal offence which
Mashelkar is trying to palm off as 'certain technical inaccuracies? in
his letter of withdrawal. Plagiarizing is an offence and we at the
university are dealing with such offence in a very serious manner
where students are removed from the university for plagiarizing. In
the case of Mashelkar report, plagiarizing is not a minor technical
offence as Mashelkar is trying to make it out to be. The whole report
has been picked up by Mashelkar and his associates from Shamnad
Basheer?s pamphlet paid for by the members of INTERPAT, a group of
foreign multinationals. The few direct sentences picked up in
Mashelkar?s report from Shamnad Basheer?s Limiting the Patentability
of Pharmaceutical Inventions and Micro-organisms: A TRIPS
Compatibility Review just confirms that the report has been prepared
by people associated with the preparation of Shamnad Basheer?s Report.
It is not that somebody is writing a report with a number of reports
around him i.e. the way students write their assignments.
The crux of the matter is that when this technical committee was
formed, RA Mashelkar was a government servant and the preparation of
the Report of the Technical Expert Group on Patent law Issues ,
December 2006 would involve government expenditure which makes
Mashelkar responsible for criminal misappropriation of government fund
that instead of using the government money for the purpose of
preparing an honest and critical report on compatibility of Section
3(d) of the Indian patent act with the TRIPS Agreement, he let outside
forces dictate to him and his group a particular recommendation.
Somebody should file a case in the Indian court against Mashelkar for
criminal misappropriation of government fund, only then the truth
would come out as to who actually drafted the report. If no complaint
is filed right now, he will come up with same things rehashed in
another form as he promised to do in three months in his letter. It is
possible he will try to take the defense of government servant
performing his duty and no cognizance of complaint is to be taken by
the court without the government?s permission. When the matter come to
that stage then we can argue that whether preparation of a report in
collusion with the foreign pharmaceutical films amount to performing
his duties. In my view, if the case is not filed against Mashelkar and
others for criminal misappropriation of fund, the truth will never
come out.
In fact Mashelakr?s report has nothing to do with examining the
compatibility of section 3(d) of the Indian patent act with the TRIPS
Agreement. If you look at the report and if you still want to call it
a report, it is based on patenting practices in other countries (Annex
II) and PCT Applications filed by Indians in the field of drug and
pharmaceuticals (mostly pertaining to different forms of same
substance) both of which have nothing to do with examining the TRIPS
compatibility. In the recent case of Mcrosoft v. AT&T being argued
before the US Supreme court, advocate for the US government, Joseffer
himself argued that ?there are significant differences between the
nation?s patent laws. For software in particular, the United States is
much more bullish on the patentability of software-related inventions
than many other countries. But even for more mundane reasons, if we
were talking about anything ? it could be that the foreign government
doesn?t think that an invention is particularly novel, it just
disagrees with us about that, or it doesn?t think there is sufficient
advance in the prior art sufficiently inventive to warrant patent
protection.? Mashelkar Report has gone beyond the position of the US
government which has consistently used patenting monopoly as an
instrument of its foreign policy. Any lawyer can brief you on the
criminal complaint against Mashelkar. The criminal complaint can be
filed against each and every member of the Technical Group to find out
the actual role played by them and by multinatioinals in preparation
of this report. To start with, a letter may be sent to teh Commerce
Secretary Mr. Dua requesting him to take actin against Mashelkar. Give
him fifteen days adn another reminder after fifteen days. Pleae file a
complaint afterwards on the basis that the government has not taken
any action against Mashelkar. I have a hatred for this man. The
content of the report and the timings of the report i.e. just before
the hearing at Madras HIgh Court. It is too much.
Daya Shanker
Quoting chan park <chansoobak@yahoo.com>:

> --
> [ Picked text/plain from multipart/alternative ]
>    http://www.indianexpress.com/story/23941.html        New Delhi,
> February 21: R A Mashelkar, former Director General of the Council
> of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has asked the
> government to =93withdraw=94 a report written by a panel he headed after
>  a crucial paragraph on patent law was found to have been copied ad
> verbatim from other sources, without any attribution.
> Mashelkar, considered the force behind the the country=92s progress on
>  intellectual property and patent issues, submitted this 56-page
> report on December 29 last year, his last day in office after a
> 30-year-long illustrious tenure.         =93I am broken-hearted at
> being let down so badly,=94 an emotional Mashelkar told The Indian
> Express. =93This is the first time such a thing has happened.=94 He said
>  that a new report will be submitted in three months that will
> follow  the =93best ethical practices.=94         =93Being a scientist, I
> am so  fussy about attributions but in the rush of the last working
> day,
>  a slip did happen and I deeply regret it,=94 he said. He said he
> offered his =93unconditional apologies for the inconvenience that has
> been caused to the Government=94 and that he took =93full responsibility
>  for this unfortunate development.=94         At the centre of the
> controversy is paragraph 5.10 in Report of the Technical Expert
> Group on Patent Law issues, that was meant to examine whether
> India=92s patent laws are compatible with the Agreement on Trade
> Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).   The paragraph
> has been reproduced from a submission made to the committee by
> lawyer Shamnad Basheer, currently a Frank H. Marks Visiting
> Associate Professor in intellectual property law at the George
> Washington University Law School.         Basheer=92s submission has
> been passed off as the committee=92s conclusion: =93It is important to
> distinguish =91ever-greening=92 from what is commonly referred to as
> =91incremental innovation=92. While =91ever-greening=92 refers to an
> extension of a patent
>  monopoly, achieved by executing trivial and insignificant changes
> to an already existing patented product, =91incremental innovations=92
> are sequential developments that build on the original patented
> product and may be of tremendous value in a country like India.
> Therefore, such incremental developments ought to be encouraged by
> the Indian patent regime.=94         This far-reaching interpretation
> has an important bearing on how patent laws are interpreted in
> India, especially regarding the time-frame in which cheaper generic
> drugs can be made available of the hugely expensive patented
> molecules. As of now, drug companies routinely use =93incremental
> innovations=94 to extend their patent period indefinitely.         On
> February 19, Mashelkar wrote to the Ministry of Commerce and
> Industry, the parent body under which the group was constituted to
> examine whether India=92s patent laws are compatible with the
> Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS).
>  According
>  to the letter, a copy of which is with The Indian Express,
> Mashelkar admitted that =93certain technical inaccuracies in the
> report that have inadvertently crept while the initial drafts were
> attempted by a drafting sub-group were unfortunately not detected in
>  time and therefore not corrected.=94         Basheer, when contacted,
>  said that the committee=92s observations were indeed =93borrowed from
> my  report=94 but he added that to call it =93plagiarism is incorrect.=94
>
>
>
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