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
Continue Reading
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
In Geneva this week the US government is taking a harder line in the WIPO negotiations for a treaty on copyright exceptions for the blind, and the reason is simple — lobbyists for the MPAA and publishers have been all over the White House, demanding a retreat from compromises made in February, and demanding that the Obama Administration push new global standards for technical protection measures, strip the treaty text of any reference to fair use and fair dealing, and impose new financial liabilities on libraries that serve blind people. Continue Reading
On 15 April 2013, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in the case Association for Molecular Pathology, et. al., v. Myriad Genetics, et. al, hearing arguments over the question: are human genes patentable? The case, which has been litigated since 2009, specifically involves two genes, known as the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes which are associated with an individual’s susceptibility to breast and ovarian cancer. Continue Reading
On 11 April 2013, the United States made the following intervention on day 2 of the WIPO inter-sessional meeting on the protection of broadcasting organizations. The US noted the concerns expressed by content holders, technology companies, consumer and civil society groups about “creating extra layers of protection requiring additional clearance of rights”.