Original news and analysis on international IP policy
Pfizer Board Chairman and CEO Ian Read has been elected as the next president of the Geneva-based International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA), a two-year role.
A new academic report looks into the relationship between intellectual property and access to science and culture, in the wake of work on the issue by former United Nations Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, Farida Shaheed. Contributors to the report aimed at reflecting on how the intellectual property system can foster economic growth while encouraging non-economic values and objectives of human development.
As 16 Asia and Pacific nations prepare to meet in Indonesia next week for the next round of negotiations for a large regional trade agreement called RCEP, more than 300 civil society groups signed a letter urging negotiators to reject efforts to bring in texts from the separate Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The United Kingdom government is preparing to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement, it said on 28 November. The move took the patent community by surprise but failed to relieve uncertainty about what will happen when the UK finally Brexits the EU, according to patent attorneys in the UK.
The Staff Association of the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) this week issued a strongly worded statement in solidarity with staff at the European Patent Office. They called the EPO essential to Europe and said the EPO president's repressive "19th century"-style anti-worker tactics are endangering the institution and the European economy.
The European Union Council of member states today agreed on draft regulations to prevent blocking of cross-border e-commerce, but appears to retain copyright restrictions.
NAIROBI, Kenya -- A ruling this month by a Kenyan court that artists, performers and musicians cannot be compelled or forced to join a collective management organisation (CMO) to collect royalties on their behalf could spell doom for CMOs in the country, experts fear.
The US Copyright Office is supposed to balance the interests of copyright owners with the interests of everyone else. However, the Office’s latest regulation, which takes effect 1 December, may be anything but fair and balanced. It could, according to critics, strip Facebook, YouTube, and other online companies of a vital statutory safe harbor, thus making these companies liable when their users post infringing material online. Online companies could face billions in infringement damages, driving them out of business.
The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) today announced that its director general is stepping down at the end of January.
Collective management organisations need to embrace online trading platforms, so as to increase earnings for economies and creators. That was the call made during a recent regional workshop on digital licensing and documentation in Harare, Zimbabwe for music collective management organisations (CMOs) by the member states of the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO).
Q. Todd Dickinson is a shareholder at Polsinelli law firm, and was director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) under President Clinton, a former lead IP counsel for two Fortune 50 corporations, and most recently executive director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA). In an interview with Intellectual Property Watch on 18 November in the margins of the IP Dealmakers conference in New York, Dickinson discussed US prospects for national and international IP policy after the presidential election, changes in Geneva, reform of US IP law, and repairing relationships.
Part of the decision whether to file a patent in a particular country rests on how likely it is the patent can be effectively enforced, but until recently the information needed to answer that question was mostly anecdotal, Nikolaos Papageorgiadis, University of Liverpool Management School (UK) international business lecturer, said at a webinar. To remedy that, he and Cranfield School of Management Economic Policy, Sustainability and Performance Reader Konstantinos Alexiou created the Index Of Patent Systems Strength, which ranks the effectiveness and efficiency of the patent systems of 49 countries.