Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The Office of the United States Trade Representative today released its 2017 trade policy agenda. The report includes numerous references to intellectual property rights, mainly focused on enforcement, plans for multilateral discussions on IPR and trade, and promises of an aggressive stance on geographical indications. But overall it is short on overall details about what's to come with the new administration.
Public health stakeholders – and just about everyone else – may take notice of a meeting planned for May in the Netherlands, as it could offer the beginning of a new approach to pharmaceutical costs. High drug prices have become a ‘kitchen table’ issue in countries of all economic sizes recently, and the World Health Organization is teaming up with the Dutch government to address it in a new and practical way.
Financing for research and development into so-called neglected diseases – those predominantly affecting lower-income populations – rose recently mainly due to the Ebola outbreak, and private sector contributions represent a bigger share, according to the latest available data from a Gates Foundation-supported database.
Big Pharma wants to develop treatments for rare diseases, with government support. The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) this week launched a new report describing policy priorities to increase research and development into rare diseases.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is deliberating on how to start over on its search for a new executive director after questions arose near the end of the process.
The German Federal Intelligence Agency (Bundesnachrichtendienst, BND) spied on foreign journalists, according to a report of German magazine “Der Spiegel”. A document obtained by the magazine showed that the BND had taps on at least 50 phone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses of journalists from the BBC, Reuters and the New York Times.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is on an “ambivalent drift” into online content regulation through its contractual facilitation of a “trusted notifier” copyright enforcement program between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the registry operators for two new generic top-level domains, University of Idaho College of Law Professor Annemarie Bridy says in a draft article for the Washington & Lee Law Review.
The European Commission is pushing ahead with its Multilateral Investment Court (MIC) project, but called requests to eliminate specialised investor protection mechanisms unrealistic during a dedicated meeting with stakeholders in Brussels today.
A new paper from the intergovernmental South Centre argues that intellectual property provisions in recent free trade agreements would impair countries trying to fulfil the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Image Credits: South Centre
Microbial resistance to antibiotics has been rising and the world is now facing the serious possibility of falling back to the days when infectious diseases were hardly treatable. The World Health Organization today published a list of bacteria for which new antibiotics are most urgently needed, to help with the race against time, as the medical world is running out of treatment options.
As negotiations take place this week in Japan for a free trade agreement covering the Asia-Pacific region, a group of intellectual property scholars is calling for the public interest to be clearly considered in the copyright rules of the future agreement.
In a case pitting copyright protection against competition, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit must decide whether World Programming Limited (WPL) violated SAS Institute's copyright by copying software interfaces that enable interoperability. WPL has already won the argument in the UK and in Europe's highest court. The case has drawn strong support on both sides from the tech sector and a civil liberties group.