Knowledge Ecology International

This was the statement delivered today (17 December 2012) by Egypt on behalf of the African Group at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly.

African Group. The African Group would like to welcome the significant progress achieved on advancing the draft text of WIPO Treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons, person with print disabilities, which was adopted in November 2012 by the Standing Committee to Copyright and Related Rights, in its 25th session.

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Morocco delivered this statement today (17 December 2012) announcing its formal candidacy to host a Diplomatic Conference in June 2013.

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Right before noon at the December 17, 2012 Extraordinary General Assembly, the US read the statement below. Here are a couple of quick comments.

1. The US Statement supports a diplomatic conference, but aligns itself with the EU, calling for a later “final review” of “many outstanding issues,” so only a tentative decision would be made now, and if the EU or USA is not satisfied with concessions from developing countries, they want to be able to revoke the approval for the meeting.

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This was the statement delivered by Benin on behalf of least-developed countries at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly on 17 December 2012.

BENIN: Thank, Chairman. I do thank you for giving me the floor. I would like to begin here by apologizing on behalf of my ambassador. He would have loved to be with us this morning, but unfortunately he had other commitments and he was unable to attend this meeting.

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The following intervention was delivered by Brazil on behalf of the Development Agenda Group at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly on 17 December 2012.

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Yesterday I received a Samsung laptop computer running Google’s Chrome OS. This is the new $249 Chromebook with an SSD drive, 2 gigs of RAM, an 11.6 inch 1366 x 768 pixels screen, and the 1.7 GHz Exynos 5200 processor. The laptop weights 2.4 pounds and has a nice usable keyboard and a well implemented trackpad. There is also the option of a model with 2 years of 3G (limited) data from Verizon, for just $329. Continue Reading →

On 3 December 2012, the 15th round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) began in Auckland, Newe Zealand and included, for the first time, eleven negotiating parties with the additions of Canada and Mexico more than a year after these two countries formally asked to join the negotiations. The current negotiating parties now include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Rumored interested countries include Japan, Thailand and South Korea. Continue Reading →

On Monday, December 10, 2012, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) filed an amicus brief in a case before the Supreme Court of the United States involving application of the patent exhaustion doctrine to self-replicating technology. KEI filed in support of the petitioner, urging the Supreme Court to find that the patent exhaustion doctrine does in fact apply to self-replicating technology and that the patent holder’s rights in the present case were exhausted with the sale of the first-generation of the technology, in this case a seed. Continue Reading →

The United States proposal for the TPPA includes many demands that will increase intellectual property rights for rightholders. The leaked text reveals that the United States seeks to introduce numerous measures that go well beyond the requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), known as TRIPS-plus provisions. Some of the areas of concern include the provisions on intellectual property enforcement. Continue Reading →

In a press release, Johnson and Johnson “announced their intention not to enforce the patents they own and control on the antiretroviral (ARV) drug darunavir provided the darunavir product is medically acceptable and is used only in resource-limited settings,” which J&J defines as the 48 UN defined Least Developed Countries plus any other country in sub-Saharan Africa. This is the KEI statement on the J&J darunavir announcement.

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