The top bipartisan members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives responsible for trade, legal and intellectual property issues today sent a strongly worded letter to World Intellectual Property Organization Director General Francis Gurry demanding that all WIPO members be permitted to fully participate in an upcoming treaty negotiation and raising concern about the trade and economic impact of currently proposed text. The treaty negotiation among a small group of WIPO members is expected to raise the level of protection of geographical indications, which are a key dividing point between Europe and the United States.
The 12 February letter, available here [pdf], was signed by the highest ranking Republicans and Democrats overseeing the Senate Finance Committee, House Ways and Means Committee, and the Senate and House Judiciary Committees.
“We write to express serious concerns about the process” by which the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is seeking to make changes to the Lisbon Agreement for the Protection of Appellations of Origin,” they wrote. “These proposed changes would have a significant impact on companies across the globe whose business depends on the use of common or generic names or on the integrity of established trademarks.”
At risk are companies’ sales and intellectual property rights, and the very legitimacy of WIPO, they said.
Appellations of origin offer a stringent and specific protection for products from certain regions and with certain characteristics. The 28 members of the Lisbon treaty have decided to proceed to modify the treaty to include geographical indications. A diplomatic conference, a high-level final treaty negotiation, is scheduled for May (IPW, WIPO, 15 October 2014). Non-Lisbon members are welcome to attend the negotiation but will have a limited role.
Examples of geographical indications (GIs) are particularly found in products like cheese, where Europeans view, for example, parmesan as coming only from a particular region in Italy, whereas countries like the United States use the term generically to apply to any cheese with those characteristics. Raising the level of GI protection could change the way these products are treated, at least in countries that are party to the Lisbon treaty.
“Unfortunately, the views of all WIPO Members are not being adequately taken into account in the Lisbon Agreement revision process, even though the proposed changes will have substantial consequences for many of the countries that have been excluded, including the United States,” they said. This runs against “common WIPO protocol” of the last quarter century, they argued.
“All WIPO Members must be permitted to fully participate in the Diplomatic Conference,” they said. “The full participation of all WIPO Members in the creation and substantial revision of treaties is essential to WIPO’s ability to foster global consensus in an inclusive manner on important issues of concern to the international community.”
The members went on to argue that the proposed changes to the Lisbon agreement “could have very negative consequences for the global trading environment, with sweeping effects beyond the Lisbon parties, including on businesses and the workers they employ.”
“In particular, we are concerned that the expanded agreement will not provide adequate protections for users of common or generic names or for prior trademark holders around the world,” they said, charging that it could harm sales and the intellectual property rights of companies. In fact, this is already happening in many countries, they said, “where US companies face geographical indications registrations that threaten to internationally block their use of common food names or negatively impact existing protections for their established trademarks.”
And they said allowing the negotiation to proceed as planned could undermine WIPO’s legitimacy.
“WIPO’s legitimacy as a global forum for the protection of intellectual property throughout the world could be called into question by departing from the standard practice and allowing a limited group of WIPO Members to substantially amend the Lisbon Agreement in a way that harms market access and the intellectual property rights of stakeholders from other WIPO Members,” they said. “Such a step would be contrary to longstanding WIPO practice.”
The United States favours a trademark system but recognises GIs, and has a number of GIs of its own. And it appears the generic food industries carry more weight in Washington.
“We do not oppose countries entering into their own accords, as long as those agreements do not negatively affect other countries’ exports and markets,” Jaime Castaneda, executive director of the Consortium for Common Food Names, which circulated the letter, said in a release.
Image Credits: WIPO
[…] February, members of the US Congress sent a letter to Director General Francis Curry, voicing their fears over the proposed changes to the Agreement. […]
[…] “All delegations should be entitled to preserve their sovereign rights and defend their national interests in this organization, and several have written to the Lisbon Union members to state the importance of that principle,” she said. “Our Congress has also written to the Director General to express strong concern” (IPW, WIPO, 13 February 2015). […]