Original news and analysis on international IP policy
A group of countries working to expand the World Trade Organization Information Technology Agreement (ITA) showed progress this week, but some continued to have reservations, the WTO reported.
South-South trade and investment is growing and could lead to greater technology sharing but some countries are left out, particularly least developed countries, due to lack of technological capacity, according to a new United Nations report that also looked at intellectual property in the context of the rising South-South collaboration. Separately, UNCTAD also has begun consultations on joint work with the World Intellectual Property Organization.
The United States has made new exemptions to a provision in its copyright law that prohibits the circumvention of technological measures to gain access to protected digital works.
The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) held its 26th assembly this week and elected its new president. He presented the future orientation of the industry group, saying will work on trust-building and needs predictability in the regulatory process, policies that sustain and encourage innovation, and a strong intellectual property system, he said.
This week, members of a consortium sponsored by the World Intellectual Property Organization to facilitate research in neglected diseases celebrated the first anniversary of the initiative and claimed an expanding membership and several research collaborations or agreements.
Members of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) meet this week for their annual Council and a series of preparatory meetings. Meanwhile, civil society keeps pushing for greater participation.
After three days of mostly informal discussions and a set of succeeding draft texts of what could become a treaty for visually impaired persons, World Intellectual Property Organization members tonight closed discussions with yet another version of the text showing agreement in some areas and work still to be done.
Coinciding with the marathon negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization for a potential treaty for the visually-impaired persons, a United States court handed down a ruling this month that goes in favour of copyright exceptions in the digitisation of books for the purposes of preservation, text search and access for the blind.
A new working document on an international instrument on copyright limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons being negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization has been issued this morning. The document is below.
On 16 September, the United States made its patent system more like everyone else’s. The country began implementing a new patent office procedure for challenging the validity of recently issued patents. This was, however, only a modest step towards harmonisation because the US version of post-grant patent review has little in common with the corresponding processes available in other countries, according to experts.
A new open-access journal for science, eLife, has released its first collection of research articles.
Washington, DC - Standards guide many aspects of our lives. They instruct how telephones talk to each other, how the life sciences community shares information, how electrical devices are charged, and how the internet runs, among other things.
It’s standard-setting organisations (SSOs) that facilitate discussions among stakeholders - including intellectual property owners and users - and produce common, typically voluntary technical standards to address needs and concerns of those using the technology. Companies need to make compatible or interoperable products that comply with these standards in order to compete in the global marketplace. And intellectual property is increasingly coming into play in the development of these standards.