Original news and analysis on international IP policy
World Intellectual Property Organization members congregated this week to advance work on a potential treaty on industrial designs, and to look into trademark protection against infringement on the internet, including through social media. But they ended early after nominal progress in these promising new areas for the United Nations agency.
Intellectual property is an available space in which any country can compete, but certain policies are helpful, the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization said today. And he described a global geographic shift in innovation away from Europe and the United States.
The World Intellectual Property Organization went to India last week to highlight the country’s success in creating a digital library of Indian traditional knowledge, which it uses to prevent illegitimate patenting of its resources. But whether WIPO found a way to fit the Indian project into the UN agency’s mission to protect and promote intellectual property rights was unclear.
The traditional copyright system’s balance for encouraging yet controlling access to copyrighted works in order to extract value for them has met with a destructive force in the internet that it cannot overcome without changing itself, the head of the World Intellectual Property Organization said recently in a landmark speech. And he proposed several elements for the way forward.
In a significant development for ongoing copyright negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization, the World Blind Union has distanced itself from initiatives it sees as distractions from a primary goal at the international level: To get agreement on a treaty promoting better access to reading material for visually impaired readers.
The new international agreement on access and benefit-sharing of genetic resources has many IP implications, according to panellists at an event last week. And at least one United Nations agency is launching an effort to help countries with those IP implications.
Country experts this week took up the challenge of doing the groundwork for negotiations towards a treaty on the protection of genetic resources at the World Intellectual Property Organization. Breaking uncharacteristically early on the final day today, the experts’ work delivered a set of options reflecting all points of views for negotiators to work from.
A new draft document was issued yesterday by a drafting group of experts at the World Intellectual Property Organization. The drafting group was in charge of cleaning up a text with aspirations to become a draft international instrument on the protection of genetic resources, and added a number of options for a possible treaty.
Experts discussing the protection of genetic resources at the World Intellectual Property Organization this week are struggling to stay within their technical mandate as the issues carry significant political impact. Discussions today resulted in a marked-up text on objectives and principles of a possible international instrument that reveals key differences among members on the role of IP, and of WIPO, in genetic resources.
Having successfully advanced discussions toward treaties on the protection of folklore and traditional knowledge, country experts this week are meeting at the World Intellectual Property Organization to discuss the protection of genetic resources. But this time, it might prove trickier.