Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Development Agenda coordination again topped the agenda this week at the latest World Intellectual Property Organization meeting - this time, in the Advisory Committee on Enforcement. Also causing discussion was how to proceed with the group's work programme, as seven governments made different suggestions for future topics.
This year marks the first time a website address may exist fully in Chinese, Russian, Arabic, or other non-Latin scripts. Ten years from now, the percentage of English content could easily drop below 25 percent. But there are still obstacles to this linguistically local revolution, writes John Yunker.
As the first flurries of snow gave Geneva a foretaste of winter, delegates yesterday ended a week of negotiations in the World Intellectual Property Organization committee overseeing implementation of the WIPO Development Agenda. They agreed on some projects and postponed discussions on others until the next session, but remained frozen without agreement on details of the coordination mechanism for Agenda implementation. Numerous corridor discussions and informal meetings did not help the process.
Members of the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization this week are in discussions on how to ensure that WIPO activities are development-oriented. A particular focus will be the implementation of a Development Agenda coordination mechanism approved at the last session in May. Also new on the table this week is an agenda item on development-related issues and a proposal for a new project on cooperation between developing countries.
Innovation or “jugaad” has always driven the Indian economy. However, the last decade has been witness to an emerging paradigm shift to high-quality value-added innovation, writes industry lawyer Sunita K. Sreedharan.
World Intellectual Property Organization members this week took early steps toward the possibility of a treaty to facilitate the registration of industrial designs, and urged WIPO to continue addressing potential new challenges to trademarks from the impending expansion of domain names on the internet.
"Instead of re-hashing old debates about patents, patients and profits, forward-looking pharmaceutical executives should consider new ways of ensuring that medicines reach all patients who need them," writes John Erickson, one of the researchers who discovered the HIV medicine recently licensed by the National Institutes of Health to the Medicines Patent Pool.
A first proposal on the future mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is on the agenda this week at the ongoing 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. A proposal prepared by the Group of 77 and China opts for another five-year mandate for the IGF to discuss internet public policy related issues and embraces the so-called multi-stakeholder principle.
Most businesspeople and generalists understand that social media can be an important but risky part of doing business. This article seeks to identify how to spot potential intellectual property law issues associated with social media websites and content that can arise for a company.
A substantive review of a rarely-used amendment to the World Trade Organization intellectual property rules and enforcement trends that may threaten multilateral trade system topped the agenda this week in the Council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
European proponents of geographical indications have granted an award to a Hawaiian coffee lacking GI protection as a sign of solidarity with the producers, they said. Europe is a prominent actor in this type of intellectual property right on products linked to a specific regions, and the French government along with a GI lobby group last week held an informational event geared towards Africa.
After three weeks of negotiations, member countries and the secretariat of the United Nations International Telecommunication Union hailed the consensus and success of the 2010 Plenipotentiary Conference, which sets the ITU work programme for the next four years. But even through the final rounds of applause, the tensions about how much the internet features in the core mandate of the Union remained audible.