Declaration From Members of the European Parliament to Urge the Commission and Member States Not to Block the TRIPS Waiver at the WTO and to Support Global Access to Covid-19 Vaccines

[Joint statement by 100 MEPs] We, Members of the European Parliament, urge the European Commission and the European Council to review their opposition to the TRIPS waiver proposal at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which serves to enable greater access to affordable COVID-19 health technologies, including vaccines, in particular for developing and middle income countries. This call comes in view of the European Council meeting of 25 February 2021 and the crucial decision to be made by all Member States at the WTO General Council on 1-2 March 2021. Click here for more. 

See also:

  • D. Ravi Kanth for the Third World Network. Two-Thirds of WTO Members Issue Call for a TRIPS Waiver. Link. 
  • Public Citizen press release. Hundreds of Prominent US Civil Society Organizations Call on President Biden to Stop Blocking Covid-19 WTO Waiver to Boost Vaccines, Treatments Worldwide. Link. 

IP Controversies and Covid-19

[Jorge Contreras] In the ongoing debate over intellectual property (IP), access, innovation and COVID-19, numerous references have been made to high profile instances in which patents and other forms of IP have been perceived as barriers to the research, development, manufacture or supply of products necessary to respond to the pandemic. This short post (which is derived from a longer article forthcoming in the Utah Law Review) collects and summarizes many of these instances for comparison and analysis. Click here for more. 

Creation is Not a Closed Book Exam: Developing the Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources

[Will Cross and Meredith Jacob] You can learn a lot from which questions people ask you, and which they don’t. As educators and advocates for building openly-licensed textbooks and other open educational resources (OER), we spend a lot of our time at conferences and workshops talking about how to understand and use Creative Commons licenses. As we’ve done presentations over the past few years, however, we noticed that attendees generally listened politely to our presentation and then spent the entire question and discussion period asking pointed questions about how fair use fits in. Click here for more. 

Fair Use Jurisprudence 2019-2021

[Jack Lerner, Luke Hartman, and Jordin Wilcher] We are excited to celebrate Fair Use Week with a new report from the UC Irvine School of Law’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology (IPAT) Clinic: Fair Use Jurisprudence 2019–2021: A Comprehensive Review… At the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic, we work with independent filmmakers to make sure that when they do need to make fair use, they can do so responsibly, appropriately, and safely. Over the past couple of years, our Filmmaker Counseling team began to hear of a rising number of fair use opinions coming out of the federal courts, and we decided to embark on an exhaustive study of recent fair use decisions in copyright infringement cases. In total, we identified and analyzed seventy-two opinions issued by federal courts and made available on Westlaw or Lexis between January 1, 2019, and February 25, 2021. In our report, we provide abstracts of 72 opinions along with some commentary on selected cases. Click here for more. 

See more blog posts from last week about fair use and fair dealing at fairuseweek.org.