Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Three United Nations agencies have joined together to explain to their member countries the little-understood but hard-won flexibilities to applying stiff international intellectual property rules. The focus of the new policy brief is on improving access to HIV treatment, and it offers a series of actions for governments and international organisations.
The traditional copyright system’s balance for encouraging yet controlling access to copyrighted works in order to extract value for them has met with a destructive force in the internet that it cannot overcome without changing itself, the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization said recently in a landmark speech. And he proposed several elements for the way forward.
The push for ever more far-reaching intellectual property enforcement in the domain name system was heavily criticised at a conference of the Non-Commercial Users' Constituency (NCUC) of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Friday. The NCUC conference on "Internet Governance and the Global Public Interest" took place one day before the first constituency meetings of the 40th ICANN meeting in San Francisco (13-18 March).
The use of arbitration across the Caribbean has been largely within the context of trade union disputes and is still something of a novelty in resolving commercial and private disputes in the region, Abiola Inniss writes.
Recent events in the Arab region have brought the issue of access to the internet and social platforms sharply into the spotlight as governments have tried to block or limit internet access and cut millions of people from communication. A United States-hosted panel discussion in Geneva yesterday brought together representatives of Google, Facebook, and Access, a civil society group defending digital freedom.
Benny Spiewak writes: There used to be a time when Brazil meant almost exclusively Carnival, Samba and Soccer. Well, those days are over and there is an undeniable message that will echo through the knowledge-based, creative, innovative world: Wake-Up, World, It’s Tropicalization Time!
After three days of intense negotiations on the role of the World Health Organization in the fight against low standard or falsified medicines, delegates provided recommendations for the UN agency. A subject of dissent was the relationship between the WHO and its taskforce against counterfeit medicines, with some countries calling for a suspension of the taskforce’s work, though in the end no consensus was found.
A designated working group will meet for the first time this week to discuss the World Health Organization’s role in the safety, quality and efficacy of medical products, but some countries are concerned about what they consider to be the unwelcome intrusion of intellectual property rights issues into the debate.
On the eve of a meeting of the WHO working group on substandard/spurious/falsely-labelled/falsified/counterfeit medical products, research-based pharmaceutical industry group IFPMA sets out thoughts on building global consensus to address fake medicines.
An influential private sector trademark defender is proposing to the World Intellectual Property Organization to undertake creation of an international “notice and takedown” system for alleged online trademark infringers.
And he told Intellectual Property Watch that this will be followed in a few months by a separate proposal for a “notice-and-trackdown” article requiring internet service providers to divulge information about online counterfeiters so they can be gone after.