Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Thanks to the latest ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on a long-standing copyright case, millions of internet users across the EU can keep calm and carry on browsing websites.
In the post-2015 Development Agenda, United Nations members must explicitly support research and development, related policies and capacity building with special attention to the low and middle income countries, in order to advance global health targets, experts said at a recent event in Geneva.
World Health Organization members tonight approved a resolution aimed at improving access to essential medicines. Agreement came after a compromise on a proposed provision referencing other medicines that are not qualified as essential medicines.
Country officials, academics and leading global health advocates this week raised one of the key concerns of this year’s World Health Assembly: innovation and access to medicines in middle-income countries. Government procurement strategies, voluntary and compulsory licensing, de-linkage models and UNITAID mechanisms were among some of the solutions put forward.
The World Health Assembly on 21 May approved a resolution on global strategy and targets for tuberculosis prevention, care and control after 2015, which includes a new multisectoral strategic approach and bold targets to bring an end to the global epidemic by 2035.
The Council of the European Union reaffirmed the crucial role of freedom of expression in democratic society in the online and offline world by adopting a new set of EU human rights guidelines. This includes explicit limitations on restrictions of copyright and internet operators.
A new book argues that the conventional business approach to increasing control over employees and the talents they carry out actually stifles their creativity and inventiveness.
The increasing influence and role of internet intermediaries over the past decade has led to a debate regarding their liability in relation to online infringement of copyright and related rights. A recent study analyses legal approaches adopted across both common law and civil law countries in order to pinpoint potential worldwide trends in these liability doctrines.
Digitisation of copyrighted works is in growing demand, and books are increasingly being made widely available in digital form. Two forms of works however - orphan and out-of-commerce works - are in danger of missing out, said speakers at a recent World Intellectual Property Organization event, and there is a risk of forever losing an important part of our cultural heritage embedded in these works. Another panel, meanwhile, illustrated that laws on copyright and licensing also present obstacles to cross-border use of digitised works by universities, libraries and archives.
The potential for big data to yield better outcomes in all aspects of health is tremendous, and tapping into it has only just begun, said speakers at a recent panel in Geneva.
Public institutions often appear as lagging behind the private sector in innovation, especially in medical and healthcare science. But for the past decade, numerous international projects in public hospitals have included innovation as a driving force in their overall strategy development, according to speakers at a recent panel.
The explosive growth of technology in recent years has given governments, intelligence agencies and big businesses, like Google and Facebook, monitoring tools to create a new empire of Big Brother. People have never been more scrutinised at any other time in human history than they are today. This naturally begs the question: does the right to privacy still exist?