Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Mandated efforts to create an international register of geographical indications have risen in importance at the World Trade Organization in recent weeks. And as the pressure to produce negotiating texts for the Doha Round discussions climaxed this week, some dissonant notes were heard in the main negotiating group of countries on GIs.
With new European Union rules on telecommunications set to take effect next month, the European Commission today adopted a report which it said further commits it to principles of openness and neutrality on the internet.
International trademark applications are on the rise, reflecting economic recovery, as are industrial design applications, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. However, the WIPO system for registering industrial design applications, though showing strong growth, still involves a limited number of countries, according to WIPO’s director general.
Governments meeting last week to discuss a possible new treaty on industrial design harmonisation snagged slightly at the end over how to chart a course to a treaty negotiation, but otherwise reported a smooth week of talks. Officials also agreed to plan a meeting on internet service provider liability.
In a surprise and fully uncorroborated development, it appears that World Intellectual Property Organization Director General Francis Gurry has been named a new contributor to an illustrious IP blog. The announcement came at the same time as news that WIPO will likely embark on wishing for an annual crackdown list of global IP blogs deemed to be inadequately living up to the highest levels of intellectual property protection and decorum.
Filing complaints about cybersquatting, which the World Intellectual Property Organization defines as the “abusive registration of trademarks as domain names,” is on an upward trend, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said today. Meanwhile, WIPO also launched a review of its dispute panellists.
World Intellectual Property Organization members congregated this week to advance work on a potential treaty on industrial designs, and to look into trademark protection against infringement on the internet, including through social media. But they ended early after nominal progress in these promising new areas for the United Nations agency.
Comments on the future of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) - which makes the underlying changes to the internet - are slowly trickling in at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), with five days to go to the end of a consultation period. In its comments, the body managing the IANA functions for the United States suggests moving control of those functions out of longstanding, singular US control.
An alleged official document leaked last week showed that the United States is taking the lead in escalating intellectual property rights enforcement in negotiations for a regional trade agreement among countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. But there may be some concern about IP protection going beyond existing international trade obligations.
The Obama administration today issued a series of recommended legislative changes to further beef up domestic intellectual property rights protection, including boosting criminal punishment of pharmaceutical counterfeiters and those engaged in "economic espionage," increasing wiretapping, making infringing online streaming a felony, and giving more powers to customs officials.
The push for ever more far-reaching intellectual property enforcement in the domain name system was heavily criticised at a conference of the Non-Commercial Users' Constituency (NCUC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Friday. The NCUC conference on "Internet Governance and the Global Public Interest" took place one day before the first constituency meetings of the 40th ICANN meeting in San Francisco (13-18 March).
The use of arbitration across the Caribbean has been largely within the context of trade union disputes and is still something of a novelty in resolving commercial and private disputes in the region, Abiola Inniss writes.