Sanjay Pandey

Spaghetti Bowl Phenomenon and Crucification of Multilateralism: Task Ahead for WTO

As a staunch supporter of free trade Prof. Jagdish Bhagwati believes in the ethos and goals of the World Trade Organization. According to him, restrictions on trade and capital flows result in creation of dead weight losses. He is also against the global movement towards the creation of regional trading agreements. He uses the term Spaghetti Bowl to elaborate his critique of the proliferation of regional trading agreements. Regional trading arrangements were conceived as an exception to the MFN notion to cater to the specific needs of developing as well as developed countries. But a major drawback of this free trade regime has been identified, which tends to proliferation of regionalism at the cost of dilution of multilateralism. Now the challenge before the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to develop mechanics to balance the growth of RTAs/PTAs/FTAs and multilateralism in international trade relations.

EC versus United States: Zeroing or No Zeroing - The Biggest Antidumping Issue

Anti dumping duty has become rule of the day and WTO members are using this mechanism as a protectionist measure. This is so because the methodology of calculating dumping margin is not uniform. The US practices zeroing mechanism, which appears to be not in consonance with the agreement on anti-dumping, however the WTO panels have not taken it as seriously as ought to have been and the time calls for an analysis of mechanisms used for calculating dumping margin, specifically zeroing. Zeroing arises in situations where an investigating authority makes multiple comparisons of export price and normal value, and then aggregates the results of individual comparisons to calculate a dumping margin for the product as a whole, which does not appear to be in agreement with the WTO anti-dumping agreement.

Whether a Contract Pre-empts Statutory Defence: Mystifications in Copyright Law and Practice

Intellectual Property legal regime has its own statutory complications, at times we believe that Intellectual Property is absolutely a subject matter of private law but statutory regulations make it protected and transmittable under a very complicated legal regime. Questions arise as to extent of in personam rights crated by parties in purview of statutory mandates. Is it possible that statutory mandate could be diluted when parties agree to do so in respect of an Intellectual Property Right for example a Copyright? Such issues have not only bothered Courts but also those who transmit Copyrights through various contractual instruments. On any general notion and statutory construction it is but obvious that an in personam charter of rights could not be allowed to pre-empt mandates of public law.

Institutional Approach to Human Rights Protection: Indian Experience

With the advent of National Human Rights Commission, human rights protection has taken a leap in India. The most important facet is institutionalization of the human rights protection process and mechanism. But a case is made out always regarding incompleteness of the protection and proliferation process when institutional requirements are not clearly emphasized by the statutory mandate or the lack of civil-political will for upholding human rights becomes writ large. The process of institutionalization takes a protection regime close to people and adds value to the system of governance.

Economics of Subsidy

Subsidy as a manipulative support system is structured in a country by way of fiscal law relating to macro-economic management through the budgetary process. It is that branch of International Trade Law, fact file of which lies in pure economics. International trade lawyers, intellectuals, politicians and economists view subsidy from different perspectives. Subsidy is a protectionist device, on account of political economic compulsion, is a trade distortion mechanism and many more. Some identify subsidy as a mechanism to enforce equality but subsidy remains essentially a paradigm driven by economics. Thus economics of subsidy should entail all elements of legalism. The complexities involved in this branch of study squarely relates to fore corners of subsidy definition.

Theory of Neighbouring Rights

It is not possible to segregate Copyright and neighboring rights so to provide a separate legal regime for protection of neighboring rights. International developments in this area of intellectual property has created so much so trade interest that WIPO, and WTO stand together on the issues of protection and compel the member-countries to bring their domestic laws in conformity with international commitment that facilitates trade. This shows that neighboring rights have acquired a status, from which no relegation is possible now, what is left is to move further and devise stringent legal regime to strengthen these intermediary rights. Both treaties particularly deal with the use of copyright protected works, performances and sound recordings in digital networks, such as the Internet. Authors, performers and phonogram (i.e. record) producers are granted a broadly worded exclusive right of communication to the public, covering interactive services and delivery on demand. Still a lot needs to be done to cope up with the developing aspects of neighboring rights. The world looks ahead to WIPO webcasting treaty in order to see a bright dawn of the neighboring rights protection regime.

Nano Technology Patenting

In certain cases the novelty requirement may not be as hard to achieve as the inventiveness requirement. To establish novelty, size considerations may be enough to distinguish the technology from the prior art. However non-obviousness can be more problematic. Nanotechnology patenting needs a thorough examination of such facts, which makes this area of scientific endeavour more complex from legal point of view.