Original news and analysis on international IP policy
NEW YORK - Anyone who depends on - and cares about – the American patent system needs to make some noise to their representatives in Congress and protest a potentially “awful” piece of legislation that has wide support, a popular US patent judge said this week.
Margot Kaminski writes in Concurring Opinions: Yesterday, Wikileaks leaked the draft IP chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). The US Trade Representative has shown the draft text to its closed advisory committees, but not to anybody else. Content industries and pharmaceutical industries sit on the IP advisory committee. Internet industries, smaller innovators, generics companies, and public interest groups do not. This is no accident. When Congress established the trade negotiating system, it exempted the Trade Representative from requirements of an open government law that was enacted to prevent agency capture.
CNET News reports: A federal judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit that an author group brought against Google, concluding that books are like Web pages when it comes to indexing them and displaying small excerpts in search results.
The US Supreme Court yesterday let stand an important appellate court ruling on copyright law, giving a boost to artists who repurpose others’ works and to supporters of fair use rights. This decision, however, upset many copyright owners, who fear it will allow their works to be used without payment and without their consent.
US Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner at a hearing today of the European Parliament Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Committee on mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence services asked the EU politicians "to work pragmatically with the United States to continue balanced efforts to protection our nations" and "rebuild trust while defending civil liberties and national security on both sides of the Atlantic."
The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) today issued a warning about the rise of Rockstar, a consortium of large companies such as Microsoft, Apple and Sony, formed to assert former Nortel patents. The consortium recently sued Google and other companies for infringement of several of those patents.
A US Chamber of Commerce Global Intellectual Property Center (GIPC) event tomorrow will include efforts to bring industry forces closer together to get congressional support for the nearly completed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and for proposed legislation on patent litigation.
Cypto-guru Bruce Schneier, who has analysed thousands of documents provided by Edward Snowden on the secret surveillance programmes of the US National Security Agency, has called on the technical community to add encryption to the network and also come up with a new model for internet governance.
A growing list of US industries has sent a letter to the leaders of the US House of Representatives and Senate judiciary committees urging them to combat patent assertion entities (PAEs), also known as patent trolls.
Countries negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement have undertaken an intensive series of negotiating meetings on specific topics over the coming month, ending with a meeting of chief negotiators and key experts in late November.
United States Trade Representative Michael Froman today said that bilateral and regional agreements offer a way to get higher standards in areas such as intellectual property rights protection "into the bloodstream" of the global trading system, when it is not possible to do it through multilateral agreements.
A new caucus of supporters of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement under negotiation was launched yesterday in the US Congress.