Original news and analysis on international IP policy
NEW YORK – Negotiators for a United Nations declaration on tuberculosis, meeting intensively in New York this week, may have reached agreement today on a key sticking point related to intellectual property, innovation and access to new medicines, according to sources. An agreement, if accepted by other delegations, could allow the text to proceed to the high-profile High-Level Meeting scheduled to take place at the UN General Assembly next month.
The International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) has released a new report calling for a redesign of global copyright norms to preserve the public interest in the face of emerging technologies.
Patients around the world, in developing and developed countries, are encountering barriers to access to affordable medical products, in part due to patents and resulting high prices. This is occurring despite longstanding protections built into international trade rules to allow smaller economies to act on behalf of their people and make such medical products available regardless of patents. These protections are often referred to as flexibilities in the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). The prevailing view is that knowledge, understanding and use of them remains limited among policymakers and many potential beneficiaries, even as patent-strong nations and their industries work to narrow the reach and ability to use these flexibilities. In the face of this, global civil society in recent years have increasingly begun work to change the direction of this trend, with the ultimate goal of helping people everywhere - but particularly poor populations - obtain drugs they need that exist but are out of their reach. Now, the series of Intellectual Property Watch stories on this subject sponsored by Make Medicines Affordable have been translated into five languages.
In an appeal of a recent World Trade Organization dispute panel ruling, Honduras detailed a list of alternate interpretations of the decision to uphold Australia’s tobacco plain packaging measures. Honduras called on the WTO Appellate Body to “reverse the Panel’s findings and conclusions,” claiming that the ruling was “not the result of an objective assessment of the matter.”
The Trump administration today announced it is considering raising its proposed tariffs from 10 to 25 percent on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports. The move is another in an attempt to get China to change the way it treats US companies including by alleging forcing transfer of technology and intellectual property.
The United States is piling up dispute settlement cases against its trading partners at the World Trade Organization while at the same time ironically blocking any progress on the selection of panellists for appeals in the WTO dispute settlement process.
The World Trade Organization last month released the long-awaited ruling of its dispute settlement body on Australia's legislation requiring plain packaging for tobacco products, finding in favour of Australia. Yesterday, Honduras filed a formal appeal against the ruling.
Major trading powers led by the United States and European Union took China to task in a World Trade Organization forum today (11 July) over the county's weak intellectual property rights regime.
The WTO Panel’s long-awaited Reports in the four complaints against Australia’s tobacco plain packaging measures were circulated on 28 June 2018, more than 4 years since Panel establishment. Australia’s victory was absolute. It successfully defended its measures against every claim. Yet closer analysis of the Panel’s reasoning regarding specific provisions such as Article 20 of the TRIPS Agreement may cause some concern for policy-makers given how much the Panel’s conclusions relied on its assessment of the facts and evidence before it.
A recent event jointly organised by the Graduate Institute Centre for Trade and Economic Integration and the United Kingdom Department for International Trade and its Mission to the WTO brought together several leaders on global trade to discuss the current challenges in trade and how best to address them.