Original news and analysis on international IP policy
It was a mixed message going out from the eG8 Forum - the first “Internet G8 meeting“ - that ended in Paris this week and passed its results to the heads of state of the Group of 8 most industrialised countries meeting now in Deauville, France.
After ten days of discussions, country delegates closed the annual World Health Assembly today with the adoption of a set of decisions, one of which is a drastic programme of reforms that is intended to restore the World Health Organization’s central place in public health governance.
The European Commission today published a strategy intended to boost the economy by analysing and applying polish to European Union rules on intellectual property rights, including increased attention to enforcement with a crackdown on small shipments from internet purchases.
Betty King, United States Ambassador to the UN in Geneva, has declared US support for a multilateral system of internet governance and an open internet.
Country delegates gathered Saturday at the World Health Assembly decided to give another year to a working group in charge of making recommendations on falsified medicines. Unanimously, countries decided that more time is needed to reach consensual recommendations, in particular on the prickly issue of intellectual property rights.
China's violations of United States intellectual property rights costs the US tens of billions of dollars in economic activity and millions of jobs, according to a report released today from the US International Trade Commission.
A much-anticipated review of intellectual property and growth by United Kingdom Prof. Ian Hargreaves was issued today.
The World Intellectual Property Organization has urged the organisation responsible for the internet domain name system to step back from revising its procedures for judging disputes about cybersquatting. WIPO said a 6 May letter that ICANN has not sufficiently taken trademark owners' concerns into account.
More than five years since the last UN-led World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and less than five years before the 2015 target date of the Millennium Development Goals, experts and representatives of needy countries are in Geneva to assess how it is going. One thing they are being told: the price of information and communications technology services has dropped in the past two years.
A European Union-backed project organised a conference at the World Trade Organization last week to rally Africa to the cause of geographical indications.
Several large technology companies such as Microsoft and Sony Ericsson have filed applications at the European Trademark Office seeking to invalidate Apple’s obtained rights to the trademarks ‘App Store’ and ‘Appstore.’
Intellectual property rights holders, access to knowledge proponents, presumably online scam artists, and possibly governments and international organisations interested in internet governance heard the call of the introduction this week of the “Protect IP Act” in the US Senate. The bill is aimed at strengthening US law enforcement’s ability to stop international websites offering counterfeit goods or unauthorised copyrighted content.