Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Funding mechanisms and farmers’ rights were among the issues that captured the attention of member countries of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture during the biannual meeting of its Governing Body.
The Public Patent Foundation filed suit yesterday against Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seeds with farmers asking to be protected against the biotechnology giant’s potential lawsuits in case of accidental contamination from plants grown with its seeds.
The World Intellectual Property Organization went to India last week to highlight the country’s success in creating a digital library of Indian traditional knowledge, which it uses to prevent illegitimate patenting of its resources. But whether WIPO found a way to fit the Indian project into the UN agency’s mission to protect and promote intellectual property rights was unclear.
Scientific advances in life sciences, in particular health, are being evaluated by experts this week in Lyon, France, with the stated hope of bringing new answers to global health challenges, such as funding, costs, and innovation.
The bill to reform United States patent law recently passed by the Senate purports to bring US law closer to laws of other major patent-filing nations. But how close would it come?
The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is holding the fourth regular session of its Governing Body this week in Bali, Indonesia.
The annual report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, to the sixteenth session of the UN Human Rights Council yesterday is unequivocal. There must be a global agricultural shift toward more productive, environmentally friendly, sustainable modes of production, using natural resources to remediate world hunger, away from industrialised agriculture. In short, the world needs a shift to agroecology.
The new international agreement on access and benefit-sharing of genetic resources has many IP implications, according to panellists at an event last week. And at least one United Nations agency is launching an effort to help countries with those IP implications.
Country experts this week took up the challenge of doing the groundwork for negotiations towards a treaty on the protection of genetic resources at the World Intellectual Property Organization. Breaking uncharacteristically early on the final day today, the experts’ work delivered a set of options reflecting all points of views for negotiators to work from.
A new draft document was issued yesterday by a drafting group of experts at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The drafting group was in charge of cleaning up a text with aspirations to become a draft international instrument on the protection of genetic resources, and added a number of options for a possible treaty.
World Trade Organization members on Thursday combed through a composite text displaying the different views on a mandated multilateral system of notification and registration of geographical indications on wines and spirits. The composite text was developed last week as the result of several informal meetings. Countries now have clarified their inputs to the document and tried to define what next steps should be taken to refine it, but discussions were difficult, according to participants.
Myriad Genetics, a United States-based biotechnology company with exclusive patent rights over a key breast cancer diagnostic test in the US, may shift its patent strategy from its inventions to protecting its data in the face of drawn out litigation and upcoming competition, an industry journal has reported.