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…
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.
With the Republican Party taking control of the United States House of Representatives in yesterday's election, some changes are expected in intellectual property policymaking, according to observers.
Today the negotiating group on a protocol aimed at stopping biopiracy and rewarding countries providing genetic resources had to admit, hours from the end of the high-level meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), that it has not reached an agreement on the draft text. The president of the convention gave them one more deadline of midnight in Nagoya, Japan, before ministers gather for the last time tomorrow.
The world's future food security could ride on the ability to save the wild cousins of crops usually cultivated for human consumption, says a Food and Agriculture Organization report out today.
What do entertainment, sports, health, religion, fashion, jewelry, champagne, software and even tattoos have in common - other than being a large portion of the elements of any developed society?
The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) held its Council meeting on 21 October, approving the participation of two public interest groups that were rejected at a previous meeting as observers to the Council (IPW,…
A study showing the economic benefits of biodiversity and the costs of its destruction was released today at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity conference in Nagoya, Japan.
The Medicines Patent Pool, recently established with the support of drug-purchasing mechanism UNITAID, is searching for a new business director to manage relationships with current and potential new licensors and licensees of medicine-related patents. The business development director will help…
A new two-volume set of books entitled Intellectual Property in the WTO, edited by high-impact academic Carlos Correa, is now available. For a short time, publisher Edward Elgar company is offering a 20 percent discount for Intellectual Property Watch readers.
World Trade Organization members will convene tomorrow morning for an open-ended informal session of the WTO negotiations on geographical indications, in the run-up to next week's meeting of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Council.
A growing number of patents are being filed on plant-based ingredients for use in cosmetics, according to a new report from the Geneva-based Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT).