Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The tentative workplan for this week’s World Intellectual Property Organization Program and Budget Committee (PBC) has been circulated. The PBC is meeting from 14-18 September. Documents are available here. The tentative plan for addressing the agenda items is available here…
The normative work at the World Intellectual Property Organization on the protection of traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and folklore was suspended last year. In the lead-up to the 2015 WIPO General Assembly, the United States has proposed to discontinue the mandate of the committee working on the subject. The US suggests replacing the committee with seminars, studies, and an experts working group. Meanwhile, Switzerland, on behalf of a group of countries, has proposed that the committee's work resume. And still other countries may be seeking to make the committee a permanent feature at the UN agency.
In a communication today, the European Commission said it agrees to support a least developed country request at the World Trade Organization to prolong indefinitely a current exemption on the enforcement of IP on pharmaceutical products. Now the decision moves to the EU member states.
The World Intellectual Property Organization Program and Budget Committee meets next week to address several substantive issues. Among the issues to be discussed is the financing of the system of protection of geographical indications, which has been called into question by non-members of the system. Other topics are external WIPO offices, and if the WIPO coordination office in New York should be closed, what constitutes development expenditures in the budget, and how to implement a recommendation by the United Nations Joint Inspection Unit.
A new study released by the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the European trademark office, measured the cost of intellectual property infringement in sport goods. According to the study, counterfeit in sport goods in the European Union causes a loss of revenue of some €500 million annually.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has announced that 27 African eco-enterprises were the winners of a contest based on business models bringing social and environmental benefits to local communities. Affordable light and electricity, reusable, fireproof bricks made from waste plastic, a mobile phone application used by health professionals for eye care, and the empowerment of waste pickers, are some of the examples of the winning initiatives.
Transparency in negotiating free trade agreements continues to be a controversial issue, despite attempts of the official negotiators, especially European Commissioner Cecilia Malmstroem, to pour oil on troubled waters. Regardless of Malmstroem's transparency initiative for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the US-EU FTA, a storm is brewing in an area not easily neglected by negotiators.
In 2011 in a small court in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle, a judge ordered the American oil giant Chevron to pay US$9 billion dollars in damages for pollution in the region that was caused by drilling activities in the 1970s and 1980s. The company quickly denounced landmark ruling as illegitimate. More than a year before the final ruling had been issued, Chevron had already taken steps to initiate an investor-state dispute against the Government of Ecuador under the terms of a US-Ecuador bilateral investment treaty (BIT). The company seeks to avoid paying the US$9 billion by convincing an international tribunal that the courts of Ecuador are corrupt and that the government is ultimately responsible for any environmental damage and associated health issues experienced by local residents, writes Kyla Tienhaara in Green Agenda.
The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi) is moving into new disease areas and has moved away from one, it announced this week.
Many developing countries lack enough human resources with the necessary skills to access patent information. Although patent documents are often unintelligible, strengthening the ability to search them in databases could help reduce information asymmetries in developing countries, Luis Gil Abinader writes.
France is in the firing line of the biopharmaceutical industry for allowing the use of some products for other therapeutic indications than the one for which they obtained marketing authorisation.
Since the debut of Candid Camera in the late 1940s, unscripted television of varying genres (from game shows to documentaries) has been a staple of American television. Not until the worldwide success of shows such as Survivor, however, did the genre, and in particular the staged competition variety of unscripted “reality” television, become a dominant source of programming in the US market. Reality television often takes on a familiar pattern – as the season progresses contestants are eliminated by audience and “expert” votes leaving one person or couple to win the grand prize. The myriad ways in which to package this formula has no limits, and in light of the success of such shows, a vast number of people are creating and pitching what they believe to be both original and the next Survivor. And that leads to lawsuits.