Original news and analysis on international IP policy
As the United States Congress prepares to recess in early August, there's hope - and dread, depending on which “side” of the debate you’re on - that legislation creating a regulatory pathway for follow-on biologics may be pushed through as part of the broader healthcare reform package.
The European Commission on Monday released a report finding fault with a number of United States practices related to intellectual property rights policy, on copyright, geographical indications, trademarks and patents. The report is an answer, one might say, to the US Special 301 report that criticises US trading partners it deems unilaterally to be insufficiently protecting its companies’ IP rights.
COPENHAGEN - While sales of insecticide-treated bed nets have skyrocketed in recent years and boosting their use is among the UN Millennium Development Goals, two producers of the nets have been caught in a rigorous legal case involving trade secrets. Now the English High Court has ruled that one of the companies, Bestnet, has misused the trade secrets of the other company, Vestergaard Frandsen (VF).
The United Nations Economic and Social Council, a key coordinating body meeting this summer in Geneva, is considering ways to move nations faster toward global public health goals, with a warning from developing countries that intellectual property rights should not interfere with access to medical products and innovation.
A conference at the World Intellectual Property Organization exploring and clarifying the connection between its work and several major public policy issues ended Tuesday with a look at public health and food security.
Interview With Ellen ‘t Hoen, Senior IP Advisor At UNITAID, author of "The Global Politics of Pharmaceutical Monopoly Power."
The World Customs Organization at its annual assembly in late June replaced a controversial group on counterfeiting and piracy with a softer dialogue mechanism that may defuse earlier concerns of potential overreaching on intellectual property infringement by customs officials. But it added a new mandate on health to a separate committee on enforcement that could raise new concerns.
Pharmaceutical companies are manipulating the intellectual property rights system and are “actively trying to delay the entry of generic medicines onto their markets,” a top EU official said of an EU inquiry into the pharmaceutical sector released Wednesday. As a result, there has been a decline in the number of innovative medicines getting to the market, it says.
NAIROBI - Three HIV/AIDS patients in Kenya announced Tuesday they will petition the country's Constitutional Court to declare a new anti-counterfeiting act illegal because it could deny them access to generic medicines. The move, which has the support of public health groups across the country, seeks to have the 2008 Anti-Counterfeiting Act made unconstitutional on the grounds that it could rob them of their right to life.
NAIROBI - Drug companies routinely violate World Health Organization ethical guidelines when advertising and promoting their products in East Africa, according to a new study released Thursday.
NAIROBI - An influential manufacturers' lobbying group in Kenya is pushing the government to start enforcing an anti-counterfeiting law within weeks, despite fears from public health advocates that the new rules will impede access to generic drugs and set an unwanted precedent in East Africa.
An expert body under the World Health Organization tasked with finding innovative solutions for financing research for needed medicines concluded its second official meeting Wednesday, working on a process to analyse possible mechanisms. The WHO afterward appeared to address concerns – which included a civil society letter – by insisting there would be more transparency in the negotiating process, but did not provide assurance that potential conflicts of interest would be properly addressed.