Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Duke Today writes: To borrow from Cole Porter, Tchaikovsky did it. Beethoven did it. Even Robert Johnson and Ray Charles did it. Creative masters all, they each appropriated music from others in their works and were borrowed from in turn.
A group of 15 US and foreign tech and automobile companies and organisations has sent a letter to the White House asking for support to reduce what they see as rising anti-competitive licensing practices involving standards essential patents (SEPs).
Google’s Waymo claims Uber, an app-based taxi service, stole technology for a critical component for driverless cars, as the one of the world’s most-powerful tech titans wages a fierce legal battle to protect its intellectual property in an emerging area of the automotive industry.
Parminder Jeet Singh writes: The World Wide Web today stands at a crossroads, as its standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), considers the demand of big content providers to provide them with the facility to be able to control user devices for ensuring that their content is not copied. This facility is called the Encrypted Media Extension (EME), which enables these companies to put digital rights management (DRM) into the user's browser, whether the user wants it or not, and whether such restrictions are as per the user's local national laws or not.
Members of the United States innovator business community have delivered a letter to President Trump requesting that the US Patent and Trademark Office be exempt from the federal hiring freeze announced in January.
The Wikimedia Foundation, Public Library of Science (PLoS), and other publishers and research organisations have announced an initiative aimed at increase the amount of scholarly citation data freely available online, called the Initiative for Open Citations.
David I. Berl and Christopher A. Suarez write: The estoppel provision of the America Invents Act, 35 U.S.C. 315(e), was touted originally as a check against patent challengers using inter partes review (“IPR”) proceedings to attack patents serially on the same or similar grounds. That provision precludes an IPR petitioner, or the real party in interest or privy of the petitioner, from asserting invalidity challenges in subsequent IPR, district court, or International Trade Commission (“ITC”) proceedings “on any ground that the petitioner raised or reasonably could have raised during” an IPR that resulted “in a final written decision.” Given the frequency of IPR and associated district court challenges, the scope of the AIA’s estoppel provision, with respect to the parties and arguments it estops, has become and will continue to be a critical and frequently contested issue for litigants.
A new report from Public Citizen, the US-based consumer rights advocacy group, shows that the 20 largest pharmaceutical corporations are spending significantly less on research and development of new medicines than they are making in profits.
A new industry report shows that the average prices for orphan drugs are increasing and are projected to comprise more than 20 percent of the patented pharmaceutical sales market by 2022.
Legislation authorising the president to appoint the Register of Copyright in the United States Copyright Office is working its way through Congress. The “Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act” garnered strong bipartisan support in the House of Representatives Judiciary…