Academic Open Letter in Support of the TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver Proposal
[Letter endorsed by 124 academics at time of release] The temporary TRIPS waiver – as proposed by India and South Africa and supported by more than 100 countries – is a necessary and proportionate legal measure towards the clearing of existing intellectual property barriers to scaling up of production of COVID-19 health technologies in a direct, consistent and effective fashion. We call on the governments of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Norway, Switzerland and the European Union to drop their opposition to the TRIPS Waiver proposal at the World Trade Organisation and to support the waiver. Click here for more.
Overview of SCCR 41 Progress on A2K Priorities: Broadcast, Copyright and Covid, Limitations and Exceptions
[Sean Flynn] PIJIP and other members of the global Access to Knowledge (A2K) Coalition participated as registered observers in the 41st meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. This note summarizes the positions of delegations and the recorded outcomes of that meeting in relation to the policy aims of the Coalition. Click here for more.
See also: Civil society reports form the SCCR by Anubha Sinha for CIS-India, and Teresa Hackett for EIFL.
Text and Data Mining Exception in South America: A Way to Foster AI Development in the Region
[Matías Jackson Bertón] Abstract: In 2015, authors wondered if Europe was falling behind in the artificial intelligence (AI) race because of the lack of a text and data mining (TDM) exception. What can then be said for South America? … This paper intends to start filling this gap by mapping the current state of copyright exceptions that serve computational analysis in South America. After reviewing the copyright regimes of the five largest economies of the region (i.e. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Peru), I concluded that they are not prepared for digital research techniques such as text and data mining. Click here for more.
Defending Access to Medicines in Regional Trade Agreements: Lessons From the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – A Qualitative Study of Policy Actors’ Views
[Belinda Townsend] … The RCEP negotiations were initially framed as focused on the needs of low income countries. Public health concerns emerged however when draft negotiating chapters were leaked online, revealing pressures on countries to agree to intellectual property and investment measures that could exacerbate issues of access to medicines and seeds, and protecting regulatory space for public health. A concerted Asia Pacific civil society campaign emerged in response to these concerns, and in 2019, media and government reporting suggested that several of these measures had been taken off the table, which was subsequently confirmed in the release of the signed text in November 2020. Click here for more.
Brazil’s Supreme Court Delivers a Groundbreaking Decision in Favour of Access to Medicines
[MSF Access to Medicines Campaign] Brazil’s Supreme Court recently handed down a decision to make a 25-year-old law permitting pharma companies to extend their monopolies on new drugs unconstitutional. It’s an important victory for access to medicines as Felipe de Carvalho explains in conversation with us. Click here for the full interview.
The Effect of Patent Disclosure Quality on Innovation
[Travis Dyer, Stephen Glaeser, Mark H. Lang and Caroline Sprecher] Abstract: The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation. We use the plausibly exogenous assignment to patent applications of patent examiners who differ in their enforcement of disclosure requirements as a source of variation in disclosure quality. We find that some examiners are significantly more lenient with respect to patent disclosure quality requirements, and that patents granted by these examiners include significantly lower-quality disclosures. These patents generate significantly less follow-on innovation. Click here for more.
