intellectual property

1          Background The long-awaited and much-anticipated “United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Carriage of Goods Wholly or Partly by Sea”,  which will be known as the “Rotterdam Rules”,  was formally adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on 11th December 2008.  It has been open for signature since 23rd September 2009 (when the first sixteen nations signed the Convention at the formal signing ceremony in Rotterdam). This new convention represents the culmination of 8 years of intensive work by the U.N. Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) and its Working Group III on Transport Law,  which followed almost 4 years of preparatory work by the Comite´ Maritime International (CMI).  It will enter into force after twenty countries have ratified it.  Several countries are already well advanced in the ratification process, including the United States. As this paper goes to press, however, it appears that Spain is the closest to ratifying the new convention. The…

Turmeric [1] Turmeric (Curcuma longa) is a plant of the ginger family yielding saffron-colored rhizomes used as a spice for flavoring Indian cooking. It also has properties that make it an effective ingredient in medicines, cosmetics, and color dye. As a medicine, it is traditionally used to heal wounds and rashes.   In 1995, two Indian nationals at the University of Mississippi Medical Centre were granted US patent no. 5,401,504 on “use of turmeric in wound healing”.The Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) requested the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to re-examine the patent.CSIR argued that turmeric has been used for thousands of years for healing wounds and rashes and therefore its medicinal use was not novel.Their claim was supported by documentary evidence of traditional knowledge, including an ancient Sanskrit text and a paper published in 1953 in the Journal of the Indian Medical Association.Despite arguments by the patentees, the USPTO upheld the…