Original news and analysis on international IP policy
The music industry has spent tens of millions of dollars to lobby government officials worldwide during the past decade, but whether or not the initiative has helped to shape a viable legal and commercial framework is a subject of debate.
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The US organizes a sophisticated industrial policy regime by exploiting an exception in the World Trade Organization agreement that allows governments to subsidize research and development carried out by private firms, writes Professor Fred Block.
Two sides of the ongoing struggle to balance stronger copyright protection and access to knowledge in the United States are re-arming themselves for battle in 2011. By the looks of it, it could be a litigious New Year.
The World Intellectual Property Organization is headed in a controversial direction, and a focus on development at the expense of protection of intellectual property rights will mean the end of the agency, the United States Ambassador Betty King said yesterday.
The United States Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva this week offered a frank assessment of the UN system of dealing with pandemic diseases, and defended the need for governments to negotiate in secret to work out remaining differences.
What would happen if the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) received an application for a .wikileaks top level domain name (TLD) next year, under its new system of opening up the internet for domains? It could make an interesting example of how well the complex system to apply for new TLDs works and how much political intervention is possible in the system. At the 39th ICANN meeting in Cartagena, Colombia this week, the self-regulatory body is trying to finalise issues in the published Final Applicant Guidebook - and it is governments and trademark owners that are calling for more time and more procedures.
Canada's Parliament has the power to save lives of millions afflicted with HIV around the world if they will act to ease intellectual property-related restrictions on their access to medicines, Canadian civil society groups said today.
While piracy remains an oft-cited problem for the creative content industry, it is the 'Byzantine maze' of copyright law that is stalling monetisation of new business models better designed to deliver content in the digital age, panellists at the World Intellectual Property Organization said last week.
The US Food and Drug Administration heard from myriad pharmaceutical companies, patient groups, and other stakeholders last week as the agency considers how to create an abbreviated pathway to bring more biologic drugs to market.
A first proposal on the future mandate of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is on the agenda this week at the ongoing 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. A proposal prepared by the Group of 77 and China opts for another five-year mandate for the IGF to discuss internet public policy related issues and embraces the so-called multi-stakeholder principle.
In a police-secured, airless room full of Geneva journalists, Julian Assange, creator and director of Wikileaks, today gave details of what he described as United States abuse of human rights in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well as an alleged muzzling of US press on those subjects. The United States will undergo its first Universal Periodic Review of the Human Rights Council tomorrow.