Author: James Love

This morning the 62nd session World Health Assembly agreed to a resolution on public health, innovation and intellectual property that, among other things, settled outstanding issues regarding the “stakeholders” for various parts of the Global Strategy and Plan of Action. (GS/PoA). With regard to the issue of a possible medical R&D treaty, the outcome of the negotiation was something of a split decision. On the one hand, the WHA agreed that the WHO would not be a stakeholder, in terms of the specific element of the WHO Global Strategy document. Continue Reading →

The WHA will take up the WHA IGWG resolution at 9AM on Friday.

When discussing the issue of excluding the WHO from discussions about a medical R&D treaty, one PhRMA lobbyist told me “this was put to bed long ago.” He was in part referring to a WHO “green room” meeting that was organized before the Obama inauguration. One negotiator said the pharmaceutical companies are pressing hard to kill the medical R&D treaty here “before the new people take over.”

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I spent a few minutes today on Amazon, to check on reports that some Kindle titles now have text to speech disabled. Among the authors who are “turning off” text to speech in Kindle editions of books are President Obama, Vice President Biden, Toni Morrison, the Pope, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Mother Teresa, Isaac Asimov, Tom Brokaw, P.D. James, Robert B. Reich, George Will and Ann Coulter, to mention a few.

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KEI has a page that summarizes the minimum terms of protection for copyright and related rights in multilateral treaties. The most binding constraints are those included in the WTO TRIPS Agreement. Those constraints are as follows:

Most literary and artistic works protected by copyright under the Berne would have a minimum copyright term calculated on the basis of the life of the author plus 50 years.

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In efforts to introduce the topic of innovation inducement prizes into the discussions about drug development, there are inevitably questions about the relationship between grants and prizes.

In some cases, prizes are being offered as a reform of “pull” mechanisms, and can usefully be compared to the grant of a marketing monopoly, which is the primary pull mechanism used today. In this context, a question is, should drug or vaccine developers be rewarded with monopolies or cash? And if cash, where does the money come from, and how much money is given to a particular project?

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The USTR report in now out, here.

The following are KEI comments:

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The following are some of the “tweets” on the new USTR 301 list:

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MICROSOFT CORPORATION, FORM 10-Q For the Quarter Ended March 31, 2009

Item 1A. Risk Factors
Our operations and financial results are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described below, that could adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, cash flows, and the trading price of our common stock.

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KEI filed comments with the WHO Expert Working Group. A copy is available here.

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These were my tweets yesterday from the Fordham/Cambridge IPR event:

# Fordham event in Cambridge, UK. Michael Keplinger from WIPO said treaty for reading disabled “would take years and not solve the problem”

# At Fordham/Cambridge IP event, Luc Devigne of DG Trade says ACTA membership will be “enlarged,” become standard for developing countries.

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