Shamnad Basheer discovers that the granting of a patent, covering an AIDS drug, to Roche in India reveals certain lacunae in Indian laws:

This breaking news is certainly going to cause problems for the Patent Office. For one, it raises serious issues about the lack of transparency at the Patent Office. Why wasn’t Lawyers Collective granted a hearing? On what basis did the Indian Patent Office grant a patent to this drug, when the same was denied by the USPTO? Of course, national patent offices are free to decide patent applications differently. However, given the reputation of the US an extremely liberal patent regime (as one of my colleagues at GW, Professor Roger Schecter once wrote: “If you can name it, you can claim it”), and that of India as a stricter patent regime, one wonders how this happened.