Original news and analysis on international IP policy
A multi-stakeholder group open to participants will meet this week for the first Geneva Dialogue on Traditional Knowledge, to informally discuss negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization scheduled to resume next week.
The issue of medicines access for low-income people in developing countries has been of major concern to global health policymakers for years. A key issue is the inability of northern pharmaceutical producers to develop and distribute affordable medicines and recover their research and development costs.
As part of the effort to address this, a non-governmental group was formed in coordination with industry and other stakeholders to develop an index to rate companies’ efforts to ameliorate the situation.
Julia Fraser for Intellectual Property Watch recently sat down with Hans Hogerzeil, a former senior World Health Organization official and a top strategist for the Access to Medicine Index, to discuss the index’s impact, independence and the future.
The UN World Intellectual Property Organization today announced its concern over the effect on trademark protection of the current launch of over 1,000 new internet domains by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
The International Community of breeders of asexually reproduced ornamental and fruit plants (CIOPORA) is preparing a new position on intellectual property rights to respond to changes in the market and what it says is the need for greater protection for breeders.
Amid intensifying competition in the global economy, companies rely more heavily than ever on the advantages of trade secrets. This critical proprietary information includes, for example, market research, product plans, unique formulas and manufacturing methods, computer code and customer data - knowledge that companies build through years of hard work, experience and investment, writes Pamela Passman.
An innovative South African start-up is offering local university students a way around buying cheap pirated books with a legal print-on-demand service that slashes the price of expensive academic textbooks.
The Obama administration has announced a decision to make a last step towards completing privatisation of internet core infrastructure oversight, namely the central root zone of the domain name system. But it is not clear what this will mean for international efforts to increase intergovernmental control over the internet.
Press conferences, stakeholder meetings and presentations as well as picture-tweets about consultations have become a habit of the negotiators of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Still, after this week's round of negotiations, answers to tougher questions like what are the chances of reconciling regimes on the protection of geographic indications or data flows and data privacy seem far from clear.
The European Parliament is scheduled to vote on 3 April on amended draft legislation that would oblige pharmaceutical companies to publish all clinical trial data in a publicly accessible database.
Japanese small and medium-sized venture companies and micro enterprises will receive a reduction on patent filing costs under the national "Industrial Competitiveness Enhancement Act" as of 1 April.
“Intellectual property, in general, is in a growth mode, and in a growth mode which is considerably in excess of either the national GDP growth rates or the world GDP growth rates,” World Intellectual Property Organisation Director General Francis Gurry said today.
The European Union Unified Patent Court agreement has not yet been fully ratified but plans are on track to ensure that the judges who staff it are of the highest quality, speakers said at today’s opening ceremony for the judicial training centre in Budapest, Hungary. Future UPC users still have some concerns about the new system, but are giving it a generally good reception, the chairman of the UPC Preparatory Committee said.