Today Benetech, a leading Silicon Valley technology nonprofit and operator of the Bookshare online library for people with print disabilities submitted comments to the US Copyright Office and the USPTO on the topic of access to copyrighted works for people with print disabilities. Here are the major points, the submission is attached at the end of this blog.
Today five groups filed the attached comments to the U.S. Copyright Office and the USPTO regarding the WIPO draft proposal to facilitate access to copyrighted works for persons, who are blind, have visual impairments and other reading disabilities in response to the Federal Register Notice of October 13, 2009.
The comments were signed by
On September 11, 2009, KEI submitted a FOIA request for the daily calendar of USTR head Ambassador Ron Kirk. On Friday afternoon, November 6, 2009, we received a response to that FOIA. This complements our earlier FOIA which covered his calendar from March 20 to May 1, 2009.
November 9, 2009
Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman
Senator Jeff Sessions, Ranking Member
Senate Judiciary Committee
Senator Max Baucus, Chairman
Senator Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member
Senate Finance Committee
Representative John Conyers, Chairman
Representative Lamar Smith, Ranking Member
House Committee on the Judiciary
Representative Henry Waxman, Chairman,
Representative Joe Barton, Ranking Member
House Committee on Energy and Commerce
Representative Charles Rangel, Chairman
Representative Dave Camp, Ranking Member
House Committee on Ways and Means
ACTA is a beefed up version of the WTO TRIPS enforcement sections, without the balance and safeguards of the agreement as whole.
This is a note about the leaked ACTA documents, that have been reported now by several news organizations and bloggers.*
On September 30, 2009, the EU wrote a three page memo on the Internet chapter of ACTA. This is about a week after the USTR held a secret meeting with selected corporate lobbyists and lawyers to debate the ACTA Internet under terms of a tough non-disclosure agreement.
While the 6th Round of negotiations of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is taking place in Seoul, Republic of Korea from November 4-6, 2009, the 5th session of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) met from November 2-4, 2009.
KEI was asked to look at federal support for research and development on (Enbrel) etanercept.
A November 1, 2009 search of the NIH CRISP database reports 167 federal grants for research on etanercept.
The final stretch of 2009 ushers in a host of meetings at Geneva based institutions including the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement, the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property, the WTO Ministerial, the WHO Expert Working Group and the Standing Committee on Copyright. To keep abreast of the hive of activity emanating from WIPO, WHO and WTO, here is a roadmap to keep track of the various meetings.
November 2, 2009
African-Arab Seminar on Copyright Limitations and Exceptions: Addressing the Needs of Affected Constituencies
On October 12, 2009, the “Industry Government Forum on Access to Medicines” (IGFAM) was launched. The UK Minister for International Development, MP Mike Foster made a a speech to launch this initiative which is reproduced below.
Presentations were also made by Pfizer (Ponni Subbiah), GSK (Abbas Hussain), Rajiv Venkayya (Gates Foundation), Prashant Yadav (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Suerie Moon (Research Fellow and Doctoral Candidate, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University).