InfoJustice Roundup – May 13, 2019
Search Site Blocking – Hiding in Plain Sight
I am spending this week in Lisbon for the Creative Commons 2019 Global Summit. It has been a great few days of conversation, sharing, meeting new friends and exchanging ideas with friends new and old. A lot of the focus in the copyright discussions has been on the enforcement provisions in the recently passed EU Directive. However it, has been clear during many of my discussions that a recent Australian reform expanding the site blocking regime to search engines may have “slipped through to the keeper” (Australian slang for ‘we missed that one’, or ‘that one fell through the cracks’!). Click here for more.
Webinar: The USMCA (NAFTA 2.0) and Access to Medicines
[Mike Palmedo] How will the recently-concluded United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) impact access to affordable medicines? The USMCA – the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (also commonly referred to as NAFTA 2.0) – incorporates many of the harmful provisions from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), including patent provisions that were suspended by the remaining Parties following the withdrawal of the US. It goes even further than the TPP in extending the exclusivities for biologics to ten years, an unprecedented TRIPS-plus measure. Beyond the intellectual property chapter, multiple other chapters and provisions of the USMCA also have implications for access to affordable, safe and effective medicines. Click here for more.
Scoping Study on Access to Copyright Protected Works by Persons With Disabilities
[Blake E. Reid and Caroline B. Ncube] Abstract: Many copyrighted works exist in formats inaccessible to individuals with disabilities. This inaccessibility is problematic, as many countries have passed laws that support equal societal participation for individuals with disabilities. Access to copyrighted content for individuals with disabilities generally requires some type of assistive technology that transforms some or all of the content of the work from one medium to another. However, these transformations can implicate the exclusive rights granted to copyright and related rights holders. Click here for more.
A Shared Digital Europe
[Sophie Bloemen] Keynote to the 2019 CC Summit … A Shared Digital Europe is our vision of a digital space that facilitates diversity, empowers communities and favours an overall people-centric and public-interest approach to technology development and innovation. Click here for more.
Is Indonesia’s IPR Framework Incompatible with RCEP?
[Eva Novi Karina] With respect to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) talks, Indonesia, the ASEAN coordinator for what will be the world’s largest free trade pact, was able to achieve substantial progress in recent negotiations… However, one question that needs to be brought to light is whether Indonesia’s determination has been supported by adequate preparedness to comply with various binding provisions, especially the intellectual property rights (IPR) regime designed to go beyond the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement. In an effort to answer that question, this article will be focused on examining the IPR regulatory framework in Indonesia and to what extent the IPR regulatory framework in Indonesia will be compatible with the anticipated IPR provision based on the leaked draft of RCEP IP Chapter. Click here for the full article on The Diplomat website.
Blumenauer, Stakeholders Elevate Push for USMCA Biologics Changes
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) is striving to graft biologics language included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership onto the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement after it was “ignored” by the Office of U.S. Trade Representative over the objections of Canada and Mexico, he said on Friday. “TPP is slightly different in terms of what happened with access to medicines; that was an area that I was working on until the last gasp of TPP to try and change it,” Blumenauer said during a May 10 event on Capitol Hill. “We were looking not at the 12 years in U.S. law or the 10 years included in the USMCA — we were talking about 8 and 5. And somehow this was ignored over the objections … of Canada and Mexico. They didn’t want this; they don’t want this at all.” Click here for more on Inside U.S. Trade.
