Original news and analysis on international IP policy
International trademark applications are on the rise, reflecting economic recovery, as are industrial design applications, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization. However, the WIPO system for registering industrial design applications, though showing strong growth, still involves a limited number of countries, according to WIPO’s director general.
Governments meeting last week to discuss a possible new treaty on industrial design harmonisation snagged slightly at the end over how to chart a course to a treaty negotiation, but otherwise reported a smooth week of talks. Officials also agreed to plan a meeting on internet service provider liability.
In a surprise and fully uncorroborated development, it appears that World Intellectual Property Organization Director General Francis Gurry has been named a new contributor to an illustrious IP blog. The announcement came at the same time as news that WIPO will likely embark on wishing for an annual crackdown list of global IP blogs deemed to be inadequately living up to the highest levels of intellectual property protection and decorum.
Filing complaints about cybersquatting, which the World Intellectual Property Organization defines as the “abusive registration of trademarks as domain names,” is on an upward trend, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said today. Meanwhile, WIPO also launched a review of its dispute panellists.
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.