Original news and analysis on international IP policy
A recent workshop held on the doorstep of policymakers in the United States drew speakers from academic and activist circles to examine the mechanisms in US law which could help lead to lower prescription drug prices.
Thought about buying a smart phone, smart TV, smart car? – think twice. Wikileaks today (7 March) released over 8,000 documents illustrating hacking activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA. In what has been described by some commentators as a bigger leak than the Snowden revelations about the National Security Agency in 2013, the whistleblower platform allowed a glimpse into the CIA hacking into smart TVs and smartphones and presented a list of zero day vulnerabilities found, bought and sometimes shared with colleagues in other agencies, including British colleagues. Wikileaks announced that today’s leak was the “Year Zero” tranche of the much bigger “Vault 7” project: more redacted details from the documents and much more documents will be published.
An event held at the World Trade Organization last week walked through key recommendations of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, including strategies for moving some of them forward.
The United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva this week will host a panel discussion among a notable range of experts on access to medicines and the controversial UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel report issued last September. The panel is expected to lead to a report sent on to the Human Rights Council for possible action next autumn.
The Swiss Parliament this week adopted new legislation to regulate offline and online gambling by limiting it to a fixed number of Swiss-based operators only. While heavily criticised by opponents inside and outside the Parliament in Bern, the main goal was to harvest revenue streams for the general public and enforce a number of obligation. A number of opponents in the Parliament sided with activists in their call for caution against the ‘slippery slope’ of net filtering. A look at other countries illustrates that filtering on an IP or domain name basis is on the rise.
A panel of indigenous peoples speaking at the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization on a potential treaty protecting their folklore from misappropriation asked that indigenous culture be recognised as unique, and not unduly considered as belonging to the whole of mankind. The keynote speaker chastised the United States position in the committee, criticised a US recent document equating the cultural significance of Santa Claus, pizza and sand paintings, and called for the respect of indigenous peoples' sovereign rights over their cultural expressions.
The German Federal Intelligence Agency (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) spied on foreign journalists, according to a report of German magazine “Der Spiegel”. A document obtained by the magazine showed that the BND had taps on at least 50 phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses of journalists from the BBC, Reuters and the New York Times.
A new paper from the intergovernmental South Centre argues that intellectual property provisions in recent free trade agreements would impair countries trying to fulfil the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Image Credits: South Centre
As negotiations take place this week in Japan for a free trade agreement covering the Asia-Pacific region, a group of intellectual property scholars is calling for the public interest to be clearly considered in the copyright rules of the future agreement.
Calling it flawed and narrow and seemingly threatened by its contents, the leading United States business group and US government IP specialists are working to limit the impact of a recent United Nations report that made recommendations for the decades-old problem of ensuring affordable medicines reach people when they are under patent in a way that does not threaten innovation. One step in countering the UN report? Change the discourse in Geneva and elsewhere.