Original news and analysis on international IP policy
CAPE TOWN - The much-anticipated process of public submissions into the draft South Africa National Intellectual Property Policy has come to a close. The country’s trade minister says the office is busy collating the 100 documents submitted by interested stakeholders and plans to submit a formal policy to cabinet for approval in the first quarter of next year.
CAPE TOWN – The much-anticipated process of gathering public submissions on the draft South Africa National Intellectual Property Policy has come to a close. The country’s trade minister says the office is busy collating some 100 documents submitted by interested…
Global health diplomacy was the subject of a symposium organised by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute this week. The symposium explored the crossing lines between health diplomacy and science diplomacy, in particular how can diplomacy facilitate international scientific cooperation in health. This week was also the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization protocol against illicit trade in tobacco products.
Margot Kaminski writes in Concurring Opinions: Yesterday, Wikileaks leaked the draft IP chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The US Trade Representative has shown the draft text to its closed advisory committees, but not to anybody else. Content industries and pharmaceutical industries sit on the IP advisory committee. Internet industries, smaller innovators, generics companies, and public interest groups do not. This is no accident. When Congress established the trade negotiating system, it exempted the Trade Representative from requirements of an open government law that was enacted to prevent agency capture.
This article provides an update on recent changes in the copyright legislative and regulatory framework in Russia, in particular, following up on the first decisions enforcing the recently introduced law against online video piracy and the announcement of the establishment of the new federal authority for copyright.
There appears to be consensus at the World Intellectual Property Organization on establishing a procedural treaty to facilitate the international registration of industrial designs. But a weeklong committee meeting last week could not solve the issue of how to include technical assistance in the treaty. The WIPO General Assembly in December will decide on whether to convene a high-level meeting next year to finalise the treaty. Meanwhile, the United States proposed resuscitating discussions on geographical indications (GIs) in the committee, which stirred resistance.
Seong-Joon Park is the director general of the Trademark & Design Examination Bureau at the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO). He sat down this week with Intellectual Property Watch to present TM5, a joint global initiative on trademark and design with four other IP-intensive offices, and his vision for trademark and designs in South Korea. As part of the initiative, KIPO is holding a weeklong series of events on trademark and designs in December.
Years-old efforts by members of the World Health Organization to come up with viable ways to boost research and development of medical products for diseases primarily affecting poor populations are coming to head, with a key meeting in December. That meeting of experts will be an opportunity to narrow down proposals being developed by the six WHO regional offices.
The international organisation providing and promoting intellectual property protection for new plant varieties held the annual meeting of its governing body last week. New member requests were examined while civil society warned against a draft African legal framework on plant variety protection that they said could impact the dominant subsistence farming systems in some African states.
Away from traditional free trade agreement negotiations with secret chapters on stricter intellectual property protection, perceptions are slowly evolving about the need to make IP systems work better. One of 100+ sessions at the 8th United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Bali, Indonesia last week featured “intellectual property exchanges” as marketplaces for knowledge. But IP policy did not take centre stage and neither did other access topics in Bali, which instead was overshadowed by the recent revelations of mass surveillance by US intelligence services.