Original news and analysis on international IP policy
As bacteria become more and more resistant to existing medicines, product pipelines are drying up. A solution may lie in a forgotten therapy developed in 1917, the use of which has been restricted to certain parts of Eastern Europe ever since the discovery and universal use of antibiotics. But business models and intellectual property regimes need to change to provide incentives for research and development in this area.
Representatives of indigenous peoples opened a key meeting at the World Intellectual Property Organization with a discussion of the definition of traditional knowledge (TK), the presence of TK in the public domain, and respect for indigenous peoples’ rights under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The World Intellectual Property Organization meeting on traditional knowledge and folklore meeting this week was abruptly adjourned by the chair this afternoon, to reconvene tomorrow morning, with a head-on challenge to governments.
In time for World TB Day today, an analysis has been published of research and development being carried out for tuberculosis by the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies.
The World Intellectual Property Organization committee on trademarks could not agree this week to recommend the convening of a high-level meeting to adopt a treaty on industrial designs.
A quantitative analysis of the 187 submissions to the April NETmundial conference on the future of internet governance shows broad support for improving security, ensuring respect for privacy, ensuring freedom of expression, and globalizing the IANA function, analyst Richard Hill writes.
World Intellectual Property Organization delegates are trying to find a way out of a dividing line on how to address technical assistance in a potential new treaty on industrial designs. A new non-paper by the chair of the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical indications (SCT) was released this morning. At stake is the committee's recommendation on the convening of a high level meeting to agree on the treaty.
At the outset of this week’s World Intellectual Property Organization trademark committee meeting, several member states cited a pressing need to move forward in preparing recommendations for a treaty on industrial designs. Others maintained firm positions on the unresolved issue of keeping a provision on technical assistance to developing countries as part of the treaty text.
The issue of medicines access for low-income people in developing countries has been of major concern to global health policymakers for years. A key issue is the inability of northern pharmaceutical producers to develop and distribute affordable medicines and recover their research and development costs.
As part of the effort to address this, a non-governmental group was formed in coordination with industry and other stakeholders to develop an index to rate companies’ efforts to ameliorate the situation.
Julia Fraser for Intellectual Property Watch recently sat down with Hans Hogerzeil, a former senior World Health Organization official and a top strategist for the Access to Medicine Index, to discuss the index’s impact, independence and the future.
An innovative South African start-up is offering local university students a way around buying cheap pirated books with a legal print-on-demand service that slashes the price of expensive academic textbooks.
“Intellectual property, in general, is in a growth mode, and in a growth mode which is considerably in excess of either the national GDP growth rates or the world GDP growth rates,” World Intellectual Property Organisation Director General Francis Gurry said today.
A recent book by a UK journalist and lecturer illustrates that recent reforms in global public health policy have ignored public health needs in favour of market-based ideologies.