Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Today in Cancun, Mexico, the United Nations climate change conference opened with hopes of finding consensual solutions for the global environmental threat and its consequences. After the disappointing results of last year’s conference in Copenhagen, echoes of uncertainty on the outcome of the Cancun conference are being heard from many sides.
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.
A better definition of the public domain is needed, but copyright and public domain are not antagonistic, said a study commissioned by the World Intellectual Property Organization presented this week. Also this week, a book on the role of copyright in access to knowledge in Africa was launched.
Member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization this week are working through details of projects related to boosting the UN agency’s development orientation. But simultaneous closed, informal meetings on a mechanism for coordinating WIPO Development Agenda activities have proven more difficult, as developed countries try to contain the spread of the development committee’s influence – and work through their own differences, according to sources.
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.
The World Intellectual Property Organization copyright committee has reached an eleventh-hour agreement on a work programme that could help ease access to reading materials for the visually impaired.
On the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on copyright’s final day of weeklong negotiations, the hopes of visually impaired readers and others - librarians, schools - looking for an agreement on copyright exceptions and limitations hang on whether delegates can resolve differences and create a plan for future work.
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.
"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.
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.
Disagreement over the mandate of a newly-formed World Intellectual Property Organization committee resulted in a vote to suspend the meeting with no conclusions last Friday evening.
With a standing ovation in the early hours of the morning of Saturday, in Nagoya, Japan, an international instrument aimed at preventing misappropriation of genetic resources was adopted by members of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. The protocol is also intended to ensure that benefits accrued from the use of those genetic resources are shared equitably with the provider country.