Original news and analysis on international IP policy
European Union Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht today announced a three-month public consultation on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Participants at a recent conference in South Africa offered insights and some optimism about prospects for local communities to exploit their traditional knowledge to help their economies while at the same time protecting that knowledge.
2013 was an awkward year in the United States for so-called “patent trolls.” These companies, whose primary business is monetising their patents through licensing and litigation, faced growing criticism from academics, business executives, and US government officials. 2014 could prove even worse for trolls: America’s Congress, courts and executive branch are now considering various measures that would make patent trolling more difficult. And those are just some of the major changes that are likely to roil the US IP system this year.
World Health Organization member governments have been working for several years to agree on ways to prevent the spread of dangerous and misleading substandard and fake medical products. Now, they seem to be moving in the direction of concrete action.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) today launched a major awareness-raising campaign against trafficking in counterfeit goods, which it said is a major revenue source for organised crime worldwide: $250 billion per year.
Just weeks before being abruptly arrested and strip-searched in New York, a now-departed Indian diplomat took on the powerful US business lobby over India’s controversial approach to intellectual property.
Looking back on 2013, the list of the most-viewed stories on the Intellectual Property Watch website shows that reporting on activities in India, especially related to patents and public health, continued to draw the most attention. Other top stories were the Marrakesh Treaty on copyright exceptions for blind readers, legal cases involving patents on seeds and on plant and human genes, the election for World Intellectual Property Organization director general, free-trade agreements (including the Wikileaks leak of the IP chapter of the Trans-Atlantic Partnership agreement), Russian copyrights, and 3D printing.
A new regulation on the enforcement of intellectual property rights took effect in the European Union on 1 January, strengthening enforcement and extending the range of rights protected, according to a legal analysis.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative will again make intellectual property rights a top priority in trade relations with China in 2014, and will not hesitate to take actions such as to bring World Trade Organization dispute settlement cases as needed, USTR has said.
A recent conference on intellectual property and the public interest concluded with the adoption of public interest principles to guide international trade negotiations and international organisations.
Five top trademark offices, which call themselves the TM5, met earlier this month in Seoul, South Korea, and agreed on seminars, reports and other activities intended to improve their coordination and help fight bad practices.
The first annual United States report on Russia's implementation of World Trade Organization commitments since it joined the WTO last year shows that Russia has taken many steps to comply with its commitments on intellectual property rights. But the US report found some areas where Russia is lagging.