Original news and analysis on international IP policy
BERLIN--The United States is hopeless when it comes to a copyright reform for the internet, US Law Professor Lawrence Lessig told the German Green Party's congress on internet politics on Saturday. Europe, Lessig said, could take the lead with regard to that reform, which is needed but blocked in the US by vested interests.
Ted Shapiro, a long-time copyright industry advocate in the European legal trenches for the Motion Picture Association, will leave at year's end for a private law firm in Brussels.
At last week's high-level meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) governments agreed to double financial flows toward biodiversity by 2015, the CBD has announced. They also came up with strategy to move forward on access and benefit-sharing of biodiversity.
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.
By Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch European Telecommunications and Network Operators (ETNO) proposals for accounting changes between internet providers – namely a “sender-party-pays regime” and provisions to foster end-to-end quality of service management on the net – did not…
In a move that goes beyond territorial disputes and past atrocities, the Republic of Korea this week hosted a training session for Chinese civil servants on protection of intellectual property rights.
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.
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.
Pro-Music, the international alliance of various stakeholders in the music industry promoting the use of legal services on the internet, has moved to give its website a facelift, nine years after it was launched back in 2003.
As a new revised working document on a potential treaty for visually impaired persons was issued this morning at the World Intellectual Property Organization, delegates retreated again into informal consultations for the day to try to advance the text further.
Sustainable agriculture needs a new paradigm in the face of the growing global population, away from the "more production" orientation, says a new study published by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA).
The annual arbitration workshop of the World Intellectual Property Organization is taking place this year in Singapore, the first time the gathering has been held outside the United Nations agency headquarters in Geneva.