South Africa Parliament Calls for Comments on Fair Use

[Sean Flynn] South Africa Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry has invited a further round of public comments on the Copyright Amendment Bill provisions to introduce fair use and expand limitations and exceptions for libraries, education and other public interest uses. The Committee invites submissions with reference on the expansions on the Bill’s provisions fair use and for other purposes in Sections sections 12 and 19. It also invites comments on additional sections of the Bill that may implicate the “alignment” of the Bill with the provisions of several international treaties. Click here for more.

The Covid-19 Pandemic and Trade-Related Security Exceptions: An Analysis of the Flexibility Under International Law

[Muhammad Zaheer Abbas] The COVID-19 pandemic has raised serious concerns about affordable and equitable access to the needed health technologies. The patent-based pricing model of health technologies further exacerbates these concerns. This paper critically evaluates Article 73(b) of the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (WTO TRIPS Agreement) to answer the key question: whether this safeguard provision can be invoked by WTO Member States in response to COVID-19 in order to improve access to critically needed health technologies. This is an important question because access to health technologies is a matter of life and death in a pandemic situation. Click here for more.

The Impracticality of Relying on Compulsory Licenses to Expand Production Capacity for COVID-19 Vaccines

[Brook Baker] The complications and limitations of compulsory-license-reliant measures to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic need to be better explained. The European Union and several other countries espousing reliance on TRIPS-compliant compulsory licenses to overcome patent barriers have opposed the India/South Africa temporary intellectual property (IP) waiver proposal on COVID-19 health technologies at the World Trade Organization. Although compulsory licenses (CLs) on patent alone may be sufficient to allow generic production of small molecule medicines, CLs are unlikely to suffice with respect to vaccines, biologic medicines, including monoclonal antibodies, and more complex diagnostic tests, medical devices, and respirators. Click here for more.

See also:  Brook Baker. Disinformation, Diversion, and Delay: The Real Text of the European Union’s Communication to the WTO TRIPS Council – Urgent Trade Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Crisis. Link.

Revised TRIPS Waiver Bolsters Demand for Text-Based Talks at WTO

[D. Ravi Kanth] The 63 co-sponsors of the proposed TRIPS waiver for saving human lives from the worsening COVID-19 pandemic have brought about a fundamental shift towards text-based negotiations at the WTO, with their revised proposal that calls for an early decision on a “proportionate legal measure for clearing IP barriers for ramping-up the production of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics,” said people familiar with the development. Click here for more on twn.my.

Interfaces on Trial

[Jonathan Band] The final version of Interfaces on Trial 3.0: Google v. Oracle America and Beyond is now available for free download here. This updated version includes an extensive discussion of the Supreme Court’s April 5, 2021, decision in the case, especially its impact on software interoperability. This is the third volume of a history of the global legal debate concerning copyright and competition in the software industry. Click here for more.

A Closer Look at the Final Commission Guidance on the Application of Article 17

[Communia Association] Today, on the verge of the implementation deadline for the CDSM directive, the European Commission has published its long awaited guidance on the application of Article 17 of the Directive, in the form of a Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council. The structure of the final guidance largely follows the outline of the Commission’s targeted consultation on the guidance from July 2020, but there are significant changes to the substance of the final document. The final version of the guidance makes it clear that the European Commission has completely undermined the position it held before the CJEU, that Article 17 is compatible with fundamental rights as long as only manifestly infringing content can be blocked. Click here for more.

Reconceptualising Copyright Markets: Disseminative Competition as a Key Functional Dimension

[Cheryl Foong] Abstract: The notion of ‘markets’ occupies a prominent yet ambiguous position in copyright discourse. When the term is raised, the copyright owner’s market tends to be taken as its implicit meaning, perpetuating an assumption that the market needs to be protected solely to preserve incentives to create. This dominant narrative overshadows an important dimension of copyright markets – disseminative competition, which is characterised by rival disseminators competing for inputs (copyright content) and audiences (copyright consumers). Click here for more.