Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Several major generic-medicine producing nations last week held a discussion on the dangers of compromised medical products and joined together to urge new steps such as defining terms, focussing on public health and strengthening national regulatory capabilities beyond strictly enforcement actions that they say have been manipulated and at times counterproductive.
Copyright law is not always a barrier to access to knowledge, but lack of adequate or predicable copyright enforcement in developing countries can prevent the evolution of their own local creative industries, said several representatives from such industries yesterday.
Entrepreneurial law firms in the United States and United Kingdom are targeting suspected internet infringers through mass letter-writing and lawsuit campaigns. Are “copyright trolls” the way of the future for protecting digital content?
The countries that own most of the world’s intellectual property rights have all but completed an agreement among themselves that raises the level of protection of those rights while appearing to reduce obligations placed on rights holders. Now they’ll need to find ways to apply it to the countries of the world seen as responsible for much of the infringing material.
The Intellectual Property Watch Monthly Edition features top news on international IP policymaking, the latest on who is coming and going in the international IP community, news briefs and more. The October edition is now available for subscribers at: http://www.ip-watch.org/user/newsletter.
A leading indigenous negotiator for a UN protocol on biodiversity access and benefit sharing says the process will likely yield a highly diluted, rights-poor protocol and that Indigenous Peoples' negotiating leverage is slipping.
The United States’ search for ways to spark its job growth has led to a focus on intellectual property rights, and this week several significant developments boiled over.
Substantive progress eluded the negotiators of a draft protocol on biodiversity access and benefit sharing last week in Montreal, according to participating sources. The third attempt at finding consensus on key aspects of the text was unsuccessful and negotiations will carry on at the major United Nations meeting on biodiversity next month in Japan.
Echoes of the struggles and advances in patent policy around the world were heard this week in the annual meeting of the member governments of the UN World Intellectual Property Organization. At stake is no less than the future of societies everywhere.
India’s laws on traditional knowledge are yielding interesting positive and negative results, writes Mohan Dewan.