Original news and analysis on international IP policy
World Intellectual Property Organization member states today are trying to agree on the draft text of a potential international instrument to protect traditional knowledge from misappropriation.
Investor-state provisions in trade and investment agreements, which allow private companies to sue governments for policies taken that undermine the companies' investment expectations, have come under recent scrutiny for their potential to undermine the public interest. Today, the United States Trade Representative published a blog post defending these provisions, while the European Union opened a public consultation on the provisions in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the US.
The World Health Organization this week is holding an information consultation with member states on the UN agency's engagement with “non-state actors.” The meeting follows a request by member states at the January WHO Executive Board to pursue discussions on a framework for the organisation's engagement with non-state actors, which has been changing in recent years.
Australia yesterday took the unusual move of agreeing to the first request by Indonesia to establish a World Trade Organization dispute panel against it. The ready acceptance of the panel request was an attempt by Australia to bring the some or all of the five separate cases against its tobacco plain packaging law together for resource reasons and to protect the integrity of the WTO dispute settlement mechanism, it said in a statement to the Dispute Settlement Body.
This morning, the World Intellectual Property Organization committee on traditional knowledge issued a revised set of draft articles of an international instrument aimed at protecting traditional knowledge against misappropriation.
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.
NEW YORK - “This is a very, very exciting time be in patent law,” Drew Hirshfeld, deputy commissioner for patent examination policy at the US Patent and Trademark Office, told a group of intellectual property lawyers last week.
In his keynote address to the 19-20 March Corporate IP Counsel meeting in Manhattan, Hirshfeld and a range of private sector speakers laid out a picture of a highly dynamic field, with legal and business opportunities and challenges changing every day.
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.
World Intellectual Property Organization members today launched a marathon meeting to advance work on a potential legal instrument to protect traditional knowledge and folklore from misappropriation and exploitation. The committee, which has been convening for well over 10 years, is hoping to finalise texts over the next two weeks.
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.
Lawrence Strickling, the United States assistant secretary of Commerce, today called on the internet community to come up with a “solid proposal” for the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), from the US to a new multi-stakeholder oversight model. IANA is responsible for changes made to the internet domain name system.