Indian bureaucrats and politicians must overcome short-term thinking and improve India's IP systems by ensuring that deserving products receive patents and making sure trademarks are enforced. Only then will India develop a true innovation economy.

Many of the critics of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and other legislation seeking to combat intellectual property violations on the Internet, say they are fighting efforts to “censor” the web. SOPA is many things, but if words still have meaning it cannot be fruitfully described as censorship.

India is on the brink of finalizing a free trade agreement with the European Union. Yet even as the deal gets close, one area remains hotly contested: protection for intellectual property (IP). Controversy mounts over "data exclusivity" for pharmaceuticals.

Any efforts to improve public health by developing new medicines or by changing treatment policies will ultimately be pointless if the drugs patients actually take contain insufficient or incorrect ingredients.

Successfully translating scientific discoveries requires a sense of urgency, which some disease foundations seem to have, and many big pharmas appear to need. Patients waiting expectantly for medical research to produce important new cures are finding bad news almost everywhere they turn.

After Congress passes FTAs with Korea, Columbia and Panama, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) will become the single most important US trade initiative, serving as a building block for a larger Free Trade Area for the Asia Pacific Agreement.

Every day patients receive treatments that do not work properly. For many this means no relief from symptoms, but for some death is the result. Yet concerted action against such products is limited. Before we can discuss why that's the case, I will attempt to explain what kind of products don’t work, and what we should call them.

Intellectual property protection is a source of heightened competition among companies in the twenty-first century.