Original news and analysis on international IP policy
By William New As delegates to the annual World Intellectual Property Organization General Assemblies work through questions of organisational leadership and credibility this week, they may be looking forward to a return to agenda items related to policy. And according…
By Liza Porteus for Intellectual Property Watch
NEW YORK - Popular search engines like Google are proving to be formidable foes to trademark holders trying to maintain a strong grip on their property in keyword advertising on the Internet, experts said on 10 September.
There are numerous search engines people can use to look up information online, but Google is not only the most popular, it is also involved in a litany of lawsuits involving online ads and trademarks. So far, Google has prevailed in US courts, but has lost similar trademark cases in France.
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch LINZ, AUSTRIA – How distant is the realisation of a “prevision” and prevention culture as portrayed in the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report? Telling the future is not as far off as critical…
By Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch Despite recently trumpeted deals with SoundExchange, which collects fees for record labels and artists, large and small US webcasters say royalty rates for Internet music performances are still too high and should be…
By Dan Krimm The continuing saga at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) about policy for approving new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) is entering what may be its final stages this summer. There has been a stream…
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch The fight between German collecting rights societies and hardware companies is escalating. This week the CEO of the society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights, Harald Heker, heavily criticised the German Association…
By William New with Pravir Palayathan
Content delivery and telecommunications are becoming rapidly intertwined in a "converging" world, bringing new opportunities but also likely leading to a dogfight among the high number of networks platforms for content delivery currently available, according to experts.
"Not every horse can win the race at the same time, and there is a lesson there for 'convergence'," David Wood, head of new media at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), told Intellectual Property Watch. "Every day a new means of providing media to the public seems to come out of the woodwork, all convinced they will be popular, valuable, and make a lot of money. But it can't happen. There will be winners and losers."
The EBU hosted a 21-22 June "meeting of high-level experts" jointly with the UN International Telecommunication Union (ITU). "Our hope in organising the conference jointly with the EBU and ITU was to bring this into focus; and, if we accept that not everything can be successful, to see through to which would be more likely to succeed," said Wood.
By Bruce Gain for Intellectual Property Watch
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and other associations representing record labels are facing significant challenges in their efforts to enforce European Union copyright laws against unauthorised downloads of music files over peer-to-peer networks.
It remains to be seen whether the EU Copyright Directive and other EU mandates, as well as thousands of lawsuits filed against downloaders, will be enough to contain file sharing in the EU.
Different degrees of enforcement and the reluctance of some criminal courts to convict so-called "music pirates" in the different EU states can make it difficult for recording industry groups to successfully seek court remedies against individuals who illegally download copyrighted files.
By Tatum Anderson for Intellectual Property Watch Some of the biggest names in the mobile phone industry have joined forces to share intellectual property but have stopped short of establishing the mobile industry’s first patent cooperative, known as a patent…
By Dugie Standeford for Intellectual Property Watch Well-loved American performers, members of Congress and the US Register of Copyrights squared off Tuesday against the country’s powerful broadcast lobby in a bid to change US copyright law to reward artists for…