Original news and analysis on international IP policy
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On 6 March, the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization will hold its once-every-six-year election for a director general, a prized post in the multilateral system. Tomorrow (4 February), the candidates will face member states and take questions. Intellectual Property Watch explains the process.
The 54-member African Union last week declared its support for Geoffrey Onyeama as a candidate for director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
The World Intellectual Property Organization has posted a tribute to legendary American folk singer, songwriter and activist Pete Seeger, who died on 27 January at the age of 94.
At the Munich Security Conference a year ago, there was a considerable first push for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Eight months after the start of official TTIP negotiations and with the Snowden revelations in between, the tone at the 50th edition of the high-level foreign policy event in Munich is somewhat changed.
The United States Chamber of Commerce Global Intellectual Property Center this week released a report ranking 25 countries on their IP environment.
Those interested in internet governance will have to put some money aside for 2014: rarely have there been so many conferences to talk about how to manage core internet resources and develop the common rules to govern more general aspects of global net communication.
The recent World Intellectual Property Organization Conference on Open Innovation: Collaborative Projects and the Future of Knowledge showed the potential of open collaborative innovation in confronting some of today’s greatest challenges. This model of innovation is used in industries ranging from health research and solutions to climate change to film production and museum design.
Copyright tops the European Union intellectual property agenda this year, with completion of a collective rights management directive, and European Commission statements on IP rights enforcement and possible revisions to EU copyright rules, due this spring. “Steady progress” on rollout of a unified EU patent and patent court system is expected, and trademark and other issues also figure prominently. But with European Parliament elections in May, and a new Commission in November, the timetables for these and other IP-related issues could shift, the EC and others said.
European Union Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht today announced a three-month public consultation on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Richard Hill, an independent consultant in Geneva who was formerly a senior staff member at the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU), recently published, “The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History.” In a set of questions with Intellectual Property Watch’s William New, Hill talked about his book, which explains the significance of the 1988 and 2012 International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs) and covers the preparatory process leading up to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). The book also discusses the events leading to the non-signature by the treaty of a significant number of states, outlines possible consequences of that split between states, and offers possible ways forward.
Participants at a recent conference in South Africa offered insights and some optimism about prospects for local communities to exploit their traditional knowledge to help their economies while at the same time protecting that knowledge.
2013 was an awkward year in the United States for so-called “patent trolls.” These companies, whose primary business is monetising their patents through licensing and litigation, faced growing criticism from academics, business executives, and US government officials. 2014 could prove even worse for trolls: America’s Congress, courts and executive branch are now considering various measures that would make patent trolling more difficult. And those are just some of the major changes that are likely to roil the US IP system this year.