Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Legal barriers for Google’s monumental book-scanning project have been removed in the United States, but the initiative remains controversial and would likely run afoul of European [corrected] copyright law, legal experts say.
Since the late twentieth-century shift from the liberal university to the neoliberal university (the latter distinguished by the managerial class installed to leverage and extract value from academic research, plus polish the brand of the franchise), the publications’ ecosystem for academics, foremost in the Arts and Humanities, has been altered beyond recognition. Notably, it has exponentially expanded while at the same time suffering maximum constriction in the form of what legal scholars have called the “great copyright robbery” (Bernt Hugenholtz, 2000), writes Gavin Keeney.
[story updated] Biosimilar drugs hold out big opportunities for India’s drug companies. But the future is fraught with challenges. One key challenge is regulations.
What does this mean for countries like India, an emerging market for biosimilars? How will the evolving global regulatory environment on biosimilars impact patients?
Last month, both these questions came to the fore as the battle over biosimilars moved centre stage in this country in the wake of an interim order by the Delhi High Court, and then another decision by a Division Bench of the same court which took a different view.
James Love writes: In a recent paper by Reed F. Beall and Amir Attaran [KEI's April 12, 2016 comment here: http://www.keionline.org/node/2467], and in the WIPO seminar discussions about the paper, the authors have held themselves out as more or less lonely voices calling for transparency of patent landscapes on essential medicines. This surprised and offended the many people who have not only been concerned about the lack of transparency on patent landscapes, but have been doing most of the work in digging out the facts, and/or proposing remedies.
Corey Salsberg writes: Yesterday was World Intellectual Property Day. April 26 is the day we celebrate and call attention to the global intellectual property (IP) system. Why do we set aside a day for the entire world to stop and reflect on a subject that, for many, may seem more at home in board rooms, lecture halls, and legislatures, than in cafes, farms, and internet blogs?
Chidi Oguamanam writes: The global South is full of significant, diverse biological and genetic resources. It’s also home to most of the world’s indigenous communities. This is why developing countries are sensitive about protecting their genetic resources and traditional knowledge.
Indigenous communities enjoy a close relationship with nature. Genetic resources are central to producing their traditional knowledge. This drives innovations in agriculture, medicines and conservation. But global intellectual property frameworks – the legal mechanisms for securing knowledge ownership – still haven’t taken this reality into account.
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is not admitting defeat. It is still refusing to register trademarks that disparage people, even though this policy violates the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, according to a December decision by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. The USPTO has appealed the court ruling, and many experts expect the Supreme Court will soon rule on whether there is constitutional protection for disparaging marks. [Updated!]
The United States government continues to ratchet up its rhetoric against state-sponsored “cyber” theft of intellectual property, but private firms largely report that they have to take matters into their own hands.
It’s easy to find valuable and useful patents, if you have small patent portfolios, but it can be a daunting task when portfolios contain hundreds or thousands of patents. Yet this task is critical for any business, and especially for technology companies that typically hold significant portfolios.
Countries develop intellectual property systems in different ways, and a recent conference at the World Intellectual Property Organization delved into some thoughts about, and examples of, how this is done.
The controversial ruling was perhaps to be expected. The Federal Circuit Court of Appeals doggedly hewed to its existing interpretation of patent law. Unfortunately, the court’s decision in Lexmark International v Impression Products conflicts with recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, according to many experts – thus leaving unresolved some important questions about how much control patentees can maintain over their patented products.
The new Anton Mostert Chair of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa, Professor Sadulla Karjiker, has pointed a finger at the country’s Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) for being “unresponsive” to stakeholders offering their input into proposed IP legislation.