Original news and analysis on international IP policy
BRUSSELS – Intellectual property experts at the annual conference of the European Policy for Intellectual Property Association (EPIP) discussed a range of topics including IP rights and standard-setting. The conclusion? Many questions remain unanswered.
Googling may be a ubiquitous fact of life, but the company behind the term still has trademark rights, a US court has found.
Infojustice.org writes: Last week, 23 civil society groups released the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms at the Internet Governance Forum, infojustice.org reports. The declaration is organized around twelve key principles, including Freedom of Expression and the Right to Information and Open Data.
The UN Human Rights Council today held a panel discussion in Geneva on the right to privacy in the digital age, featuring several experts. The panel was part of a larger effort by the Council to address the increasingly urgent issue.
European Union governments may allow libraries to digitise books in their collection without rights owners' consent in order to make them available at electronic reading posts, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said on 11 September. If library users want to print works out on paper or store them on a USB stick, however, rights holders must be fairly compensated.
The World Intellectual Property Organization this week released the decision in an internet domain name dispute in which the current incarnation of the once-wildly successful Napster music-sharing website successfully forced a website called napster.fm to shut down over intellectual property rights violations. Is Napster still cool?
Leading US trade associations representing the high-technology industry yesterday issued a joint letter urging the Senate to pass reforms to US surveillance programmes. The effort comes after revelations about the US surveillance have harmed overseas markets for US technologies, they said.
Newly arrived United States Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Pamela Hamamoto last week met with journalists for the first time by highlighting internet governance and Ebola, with a mention of intellectual property rights, among other issues.
A 3 September European Court of Justice decision on the concept of “parody” is a controversial attempt to harmonise copyright law judicially where legislative efforts have failed, and raises more questions than it answers, intellectual property lawyers said. But the decision won't affect implementation of the United Kingdom's new copyright exception for parody, the UK Intellectual Property Office said.
ISTANBUL - The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow in the end somehow reconnected the 9th Internet Governance Forum (IGF) and the new Internet Ungovernance Forum held in Istanbul last week. The nearly decade-old UN-led IGF initiative is facing profound new challenges as the global split widens over the future of the internet.