Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Negotiators of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement will meet again after all to “finalise the legal scrub of the ACTA text” and to solve issues “of a technical nature,” according to recently leaked documents from the European Commission. They also show…
While piracy remains an oft-cited problem for the creative content industry, it is the 'Byzantine maze' of copyright law that is stalling monetisation of new business models better designed to deliver content in the digital age, panellists at the World Intellectual Property Organization said last week.
The Intellectual Property Watch Monthly Edition features top news on international IP policymaking, the latest on who is coming and going in the international IP community, news briefs and more. The November edition is now available for subscribers at: http://www.ip-watch.org/user/newsletter.
United States Trademark Commissioner Lynne Beresford has announced she will retire on 30 December, according to the US Patent and Trademark Office. Deputy Commissioner for Trademark Operations Deborah Cohn will succeed Beresford and assume her new position as of 31 December.
The European Commission is considering a proposal in the coming months to create a pan-European passport for collective music licensing intended to overcome stifling difficulties of 27 national collecting societies, a top official has told Intellectual Property Watch in the context of a meeting on copyright and competition.
The World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) is meeting this week in an attempt to advance proposals to improve global access to copyrighted works, following a disappointing summer meeting that ended without agreement. This week’s meeting also includes renewed discussions of proposed treaties on broadcasters’ rights and rights over audiovisual performances.
The US Food and Drug Administration heard from myriad pharmaceutical companies, patient groups, and other stakeholders last week as the agency considers how to create an abbreviated pathway to bring more biologic drugs to market.
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.
Influential copyright scholar Larry Lessig yesterday issued a call for the World Intellectual Property Organization to lead an overhaul of the copyright system which he says does not and never will make sense in the digital environment.
"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.
In a police-secured, airless room full of Geneva journalists, Julian Assange, creator and director of Wikileaks, today gave details of what he described as United States abuse of human rights in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as an alleged muzzling of US press on those subjects. The United States will undergo its first Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council tomorrow.