Original news and analysis on international IP policy
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.
A substantive review of a rarely-used amendment to the World Trade Organization intellectual property rules and enforcement trends that may threaten multilateral trade system topped the agenda this week in the Council on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
European proponents of geographical indications have granted an award to a Hawaiian coffee lacking GI protection as a sign of solidarity with the producers, they said. Europe is a prominent actor in this type of intellectual property right on products linked to a specific regions, and the French government along with a GI lobby group last week held an informational event geared towards Africa.
As ministers arrived in Nagoya, Japan, for the high-level segment of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity today, negotiators kept trying to reach consensus on remaining agenda items, such as a strategic plan, or an international legal instrument to prevent biopiracy and ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits accrued from the use of genetic resources.
Two new civil society observers were admitted last week to the Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) though whether that represents a cultural shift for the organisation or simply a procedure that has now been followed depends on who you ask. Meanwhile, a new vice secretary general prepared to take over for the first time in nearly 10 years.