Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The blog Monday Note has an analysis today on digital piracy in light of the media frenzy over the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill last week. The analysis suggests that anti-piracy measures like France's Hadopi are not working, but there is evidence that offering competitive legitimate download sites does work.
French online rights group La Quadrature du Net this week announced an analysis asserting that in more than half of European Union countries, telecommunications operators engage in "illegitimate" restrictions of their users' access.
A recent book analyses the role of intellectual property protection in providing incentives for innovation and its impact on access to medicines by retracing the origins, content and interpretations of the World Trade Organization agreement on IP rights and trade. It concludes that the debate needs to be recast in order for all sides to benefit going forward.
A list of answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the much-disputed anti-piracy legislation before the United States Congress has been published by CNET News. It also reported that some 4.5 million people signed the petition on Google during the blackout protest yesterday.
"Idea Rights: A Guide to Intellectual Property" is a new book that looks at the major statutes and cases in intellectual property law with experienced, yet fresh, eyes.
The European Union Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science today introduced the US policy community to Horizon 2020, the large-scale new multi-year research and innovation funding programme the EU is preparing to undertake.
Despite the economic situation, the European Patent Office saw record patent filings in 2011 and maintained its share globally, it reported today.
US President Obama today announced a proposal to combine six government agencies working in areas of international trade and economics, aimed at boosting efficiency. This includes the Commerce Department, which currently houses the US Patent and Trademark Office, and it appears it would affect the USPTO.
The next round of negotiations for a Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement is expected to be held in March in Australia, but secretive intersessional meetings on a variety of topics are being held in the meantime. Meanwhile, the Canadian government is considering joining the TPP talks, and is asking for public comments on the idea by 14 February.
On the eve of the start of the application period for new generic top level domains (gTLDs) on the internet, the chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), Steve Crocker, described the program as a "major step in the globalisation of the internet." For the first time there will be equal access and an equal invitation to users from all over the world to have generic domain names, Crocker said at the National Press Club in Washington, DC today.
Current global institutional reforms of agricultural innovation systems and the commodification of crop diversity are not answering concerns regarding international equity in access to plant genetic resources, the handling of agricultural research, and the sharing of benefits arising from this research, according to a new book by Claudio Chiarolla, research fellow at the Paris-based Institut du développement durable et des relations internationales (IDDRI).
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is launching a large expansion of the available top-level domains on the internet on 12 January, has told international organisations the expansion will not hurt them.