Original news and analysis on international IP policy
UNITAID is expected to soon publish a report on the implications of the leaked provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) on public health and access to medicines.
After three rounds of negotiations for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), European Union Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht this week welcomed the progress so far. But negotiators have to “step up a gear,” de Gucht said after a two-day stocktaking meeting with the United States Trade Representative Michael Froman in Washington, DC on 18 February. Meanwhile, USTR announced new steps to raise public participation in trade negotiations.
European Union Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht today announced a three-month public consultation on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership.
Looking back on 2013, the list of the most-viewed stories on the Intellectual Property Watch website shows that reporting on activities in India, especially related to patents and public health, continued to draw the most attention. Other top stories were the Marrakesh Treaty on copyright exceptions for blind readers, legal cases involving patents on seeds and on plant and human genes, the election for World Intellectual Property Organization director general, free-trade agreements (including the Wikileaks leak of the IP chapter of the Trans-Atlantic Partnership agreement), Russian copyrights, and 3D printing.
Five top trademark offices, which call themselves the TM5, met earlier this month in Seoul, South Korea, and agreed on seminars, reports and other activities intended to improve their coordination and help fight bad practices.
The United States and China today announced agreements on a series of measures to strengthen intellectual property rights protection in China.
In time for the start of the third round of trade negotiations between the United States and European Union, EU transparency organisation Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) published the first interesting leak on the substance of the talks.
The intellectual property offices of Korea and China today announced they have signed a cooperation agreement on work-sharing, communication, and new areas of IP, including the commercial use of IP rights such as transactions involving patents.
Following the public outcry over the EU’s demands for stringent intellectual property rules that would dramatically raise medicines prices in India, you would expect the EU to think twice about making similar demands in future trade agreements, particularly with low- and middle-income countries. Yet, this is precisely what is going on now in the negotiations for a free trade agreement between the EU and Thailand, writes Tessel Mellema.
Trade ministers of the 12 countries negotiating a Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) today issued a statement signalling a breakthrough on the treaty, but lacking specifics.