The knowledge thief? intellectual property disputes and copying for development in India

Abstract

This dissertation examines the legal lives of two knowledge-embedded goods—(i) a cancer drug in the Glivec case, and (ii) course packs in the Delhi University photocopy case. These distinct and disparate things were the subjects of two landmark disputes over intellectual property rights, i.e. patents and copyright, in India. The Glivec case involved divergent claims about Glivec was an invention, or whether it was a slightly modified version of an existing drug, and thereby ineligible for such protection under Indian law. Answers to these questions would determine when cheaper generics of Novartis’ exorbitantly priced medicine would be available in India. saw The Delhi University photocopy case saw three international academic publishers file a lawsuit against a small copy shop in Delhi University. Their claim was that copying books to make course packs without permission from or payment to the publishers, trespassed on their copyright. Through a close reading of the judgements issued by multiple forums, as well as interviews with select experts, this dissertation shows while neither the Glivec case nor the DU photocopy case can be easily read as resistance to the intellectual property project per se, i.e. the creation and protection of private property rights in knowledge more broadly, stakeholders are able to contest entrenched narratives, categories, norms, and histories of intellectual property during the course of legal arguments. In this process, they offer ways to blunt the sharp edges of intellectual property law through a combination of the politics of knowledge, of sovereignty, and of development. At the same time, by juxtaposing these cases, I also highlight differences in infrastructures of copying. The decentralized nature of the copy machine makes copy shops forces of democratization of knowledge and education. Copying pharmaceutical knowledge, i.e. the production of generic medicines, on the other hand, requires considerable investment and techno-scientific expertise; and such companies are no less motivated by the logic of profit. This renders them more amenable to incorporation into global networks, thereby undermining the subversive potential of the copy. Finally, this dissertation argues that while intellectual property law is tasked with policing boundaries between the original and the copy, such distinctions do not exist a priori. Rather, sameness and difference among pharmaceutical compounds and literary works come into being as things, knowledges, and relationships are made legible to the law.