Knowledge Ecology International

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

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ACTA is a beefed up version of the WTO TRIPS enforcement sections, without the balance and safeguards of the agreement as whole.

1. The ACTA has ignored or left out the safeguards in TRIPS Articles 1, 6, 7, 8, 40 and 44.2.
2. The ACTA has refashioned in a more restrictive and anti-consumer way Articles 41, 44.1, 45, 46,47, 50, most of Section 4, and Article 61.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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).

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Distributed earlier on Wikileaks, this is reportedly is an internal Sun document, discussing a strategy to migrate Oracle users to MySQL.

“Project Peter is an internal effort to assist Sun / MySQL customers in migrating from Oracle to MySQL by offering them a comprehensive solution that consists of Professional Services, Best Practices, and a set of approved third party migration tools and utilities that will enable them to move to MySQL in a way that is as easy as possible.”

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The Wellcome Trust convened an “Opinion Formers Conference” on “Counterfeit Medicines: Perspectives and Action” on Monday 26 October 2009. Continue Reading →

USPTO has sent KEI a letter, rejecting our request for a fee waiver for processing a September 30, 2009, freedom of information Act (FOIA) request. The FOIA focused on these items:

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