Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Representatives of private sector, international organisations and others from Europe and Africa this week delivered a set of recommendations on health and pharmaceuticals to the two regions’ leaders ahead of their summit taking place today and tomorrow.
The United States Trade Representative’s annual report on barriers to US exports contains many references to intellectual property rights issues. These include latest topics of debate such as the treatment of pharmaceutical patents in India, online piracy in Russia, and European-guided geographical indications laws in Latin America. It also highlights recent commitments by China on protection of pharmaceutical patents and trade secrets.
An alleged leaked analysis by the European Union provides insight into the intellectual property section of the draft Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the United States. And separately, the US International Trade Commission released a report on trade barriers that US small businesses perceive in exporting to Europe.
Investor-state provisions in trade and investment agreements, which allow private companies to sue governments for policies taken that undermine the companies' investment expectations, have come under recent scrutiny for their potential to undermine the public interest. Today, the United States Trade Representative published a blog post defending these provisions, while the European Union opened a public consultation on the provisions in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US.
Australia yesterday took the unusual move of agreeing to the first request by Indonesia to establish a World Trade Organization dispute panel against it. The ready acceptance of the panel request was an attempt by Australia to bring the some or all of the five separate cases against its tobacco plain packaging law together for resource reasons and to protect the integrity of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, it said in a statement to the Dispute Settlement Body.
NEW YORK - “This is a very, very exciting time be in patent law,” Drew Hirshfeld, deputy commissioner for patent examination policy at the US Patent and Trademark Office, told a group of intellectual property lawyers last week.
In his keynote address to the 19-20 March Corporate IP Counsel meeting in Manhattan, Hirshfeld and a range of private sector speakers laid out a picture of a highly dynamic field, with legal and business opportunities and challenges changing every day.
The United Nations Secretary General and head of the UN International Telecommunication Union earlier this week applauded an announcement by the United States government that it plans to relinquish its remaining control over the internet domain name system.
A multi-stakeholder group open to participants will meet this week for the first Geneva Dialogue on Traditional Knowledge, to informally discuss negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization scheduled to resume next week.
The UN World Intellectual Property Organization today announced its concern over the effect on trademark protection of the current launch of over 1,000 new internet domains by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The World Trade Organization and World Intellectual Property Organization are jointly offering a course this week on all aspects of intellectual property to a group of officials from developing countries and countries in transition, the WTO has said.