On April 15, 2013, the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) sent a letter to Teresa Stanek Rea, the Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and the Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, setting out the IPO “concerns” about the proposed WIPO treaty for persons who are blind or visually impaired. (Copy here).
On April 26, 2013 I attended a half day meeting on “A Human Rights Approach to Intellectual Property and Access to Medicines” organized by the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health. These are notes from my interventions on behalf of KEI.
1. KEI does a lot of work on intellectual property rights that has impact on human rights. We do not always give prominence to human rights law or the language of human rights, although at times and in the right context, it can be important to do so.
Below is the PhRMA press release on the Special 301 Report.
Key points in the PhRMA release:
* PhRMA “dismayed that USTR did not grant an out-of-cycle review for India.” PhRMA claims that India decisions involving German owned Bayer and Swiss owned Novartis “disproportionately impacted U.S. biopharmaceutical companies.” (Perhaps PhRMA could have said, companies that have ownership claims on the US government).
Today USTR held a one hour “listening session” with several Washington, DC public interest groups. The topic was the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the European Union.
On 1 May 2013, USTR released its 2013 Special 301 Report. Ukraine was put on the Priority Foreign Country list this year, a designation not used by USTR for several years. USTR’s 2013 report spends more than six pages discussing China and two full pages on India. Below are some comments regarding this year’s report.
Least Developed Countries
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On 18 December 2012 and 20 December 2012, the World Trade Organization (WTO) undertook a trade policy review of the United States of America. All members of the WTO are subject to review under the Trade Policy Review Mechanism (TPRM). The questions raised by WTO Members during the US TPR touched upon on compulsory licensing (including cases of judicial compulsory licensing following eBay v. MercExchange), copyright (Golan v. Holder), the Special 301 report and the Medicines Patent Pool. On 30 April 2013, the WTO released the records of the meeting including WT/TPR/M/275. Continue Reading
Below are several links to recent Huffington Post articles about the WIPO negotiations for a treaty on copyright exceptions for blind persons.
The first is a link to my report for HuffPo on the April 2013 negotiations, which have not gone well. The blog includes a discussion of some of the changes in key provisions of the text over time, and the recent quite harmful MPAA lobbying efforts.
Attached is the final version of the negotiating text that will be considered at the diplomatic conference in June 17 to 28, 2013 in Marrakesh, Morocco.
88 brackets in text, plus 17 “Alternative” versions of text.
8 references to: “do not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work,” plus 3 additional references the “three-step test.”
11 references to technological protection measures
The WBU just issued the attached press release. (On a related note, a video of their statement Saturday morning is available here).
WORLD BLIND UNION (WBU) press release 20th April 2013
As mentioned in our piece, State of Play: Treaty for the Blind negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization, the February 2013 special session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) reached agreement on a cluster of provisions on the Treaty’s treatment of the copyright three-step test that resulted in the ARTICLE(S) section contained in SCCR/25/2/Rev. Continue Reading