IIPA Petition Leads USTR to Review South Africa’s GSP Benefits
[Mike Palmedo] The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has announced an upcoming review of South Africa’s eligibility for trade benefits under the General System of Preferences (GSP), a system which allows duty-free imports from developing countries that meet certain criteria. According to the announcement, USTR “is accepting a petition from the International Intellectual Property Alliance based on concerns with South Africa’s compliance with the GSP IP criterion, in the area of copyright protection and enforcement.” It will publish a Federal Register Notice requesting comments and announcing the dates of a public hearing. Click here for more.
Assessing Drug Pricing Reform Proposals: The Real Leverage and Benefits of Competitive Licensing
[Christopher J. Morten and Amy Kapczynski] Leading drug pricing bills in Congress tackle the problem of leverage with two distinct solutions to improve the government’s bargaining position: a tax on drug manufacturers that refuse to agree on a fair price and “competitive licensing,” under which the government accelerates market entry of competitors when a deal cannot be reached. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has endorsed the first approach, recently announcing a bill that would impose a tax on drug manufacturers when they fail to reach an agreement with the government on price under Medicare Part D. Rena Conti and Paul Kleutghen recently argued in a Health Affairs blog post that the second approach—competitive licensing—is impractical because of purported manufacturing, regulatory, and legal hurdles faced by drug companies licensed under the competitive licensing scheme. Click here for more.
3D Printing, the Maker Movement, IP Litigation and Legal Reform
[Matthew Rimmer] … The field of 3D printing is currently undergoing a transitional phase. While the consumer 3D printing revolution has been a disappointment, there has been a rise in other forms and modes of 3D printing (photo: Courtesy of Queensland University of Technology). The field of 3D printing is currently undergoing a transitional phase. The consumer 3D printing revolution – which was aimed at one day seeing a 3D printer in every home – has been a disappointment. The pioneering home 3D printing company MakerBot was embroiled in a number of controversies over its changing approach to intellectual property (IP), resulting in disenchantment with the open source maker community and alienation from its user-base. Bre Pettis, the former head of MakerBot, reflected in an interview, “the open-source community cast us out of heaven.” In the end, MakerBot was taken over by the leading 3D printing company Stratsys and was restructured and repurposed. Click here for more.
South Africa’s Copyright Bill Is Good for Digital Archives – Here’s Why
[Denise Nicholson] The current Copyright Act has no provisions for libraries, archives, galleries and museums. As an afterthought, limited provisions were included in Section 13 regulations for libraries and archives. Digitisation is the main form of preserving material in the 21st century. Yet the country’s copyright law doesn’t permit it. This causes serious problems for libraries, archives, museums and galleries. They are currently unable to digitise any of their works without first having to get copyright permission, and to pay high copyright fees. Click here for more.
PIJIP Events in Brazil to Focus on Copyright and Rights to Education and Research
[PIJIP] In its role as chair of the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights, PIJIP has sponsored two events in Brazil to discuss how copyright can promote rights to access educational and research materials. The meetings are being planned at a time when these issues are being discussed in an agenda item of the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. Brazil has also announced a copyright reform process. Click here for more.
California Tackles Big Pharma’s Anticompetitive ‘Pay for Delay’ Practices That Slow Down Lower-Cost Generic Drug Development
[Jennifer Oliver and Timothy LaComb] California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed AB 824, known as the “Pay-for-Delay” bill, blocking pharmaceutical companies from paying generic drug makers to not develop and bring lower-cost medicines to market. The law makes these so-called “reverse payment” settlements of patent disputes – which the Federal Trade Commission says cost consumers $3.5 billion a year – “presumptively anticompetitive.” The new law provides that an agreement resolving a patent infringement claim is anticompetitive if the generic drug or biosimilar drug makers receive anything of value from the brand name company that’s claiming infringement, and if the generic maker agrees to slow-walk or stop research, development, manufacture, marketing, or sales of a generic product for any period of time. Exceptions are made in cases in which an agreement promotes competition. Click here for more on the National Law Review website.
Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information
[Video of Talk by Eva Hemmungs Wirten] … Making Marie Curie explores what went into the creation of this icon of science. It is not a traditional biography, or one that attempts to uncover the “real” Marie Curie. Rather, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, by tracing a career that spans two centuries and a world war, provides an innovative and historically grounded account of how modern science emerges in tandem with celebrity culture under the influence of intellectual property in a dawning age of information. She explores the emergence of the Curie persona, the information culture of the period that shaped its development, and the strategies Curie used to manage and exploit her intellectual property. How did one create and maintain for oneself the persona of scientist at the beginning of the twentieth century? What special conditions bore upon scientific women, and on married women in particular? How was French identity claimed, established, and subverted? How, and with what consequences, was a scientific reputation secured? Click here to watch the video.
Worldwide Inequality in Access to Full Text Scientific Articles: The Example of Ophthalmology
[C. Boudry et al.] Abstract: … The problem of access to medical information, particularly in low-income countries, has been under discussion for many years. Although a number of developments have occurred in the last decade (e.g., the open access (OA) movement and the website Sci-Hub), everyone agrees that these difficulties still persist very widely, mainly due to the fact that paywalls still limit access to approximately 75% of scholarly documents. In this study, we compare the accessibility of recent full text articles in the field of ophthalmology in 27 established institutions located worldwide. Click here for more.
Article Highlights Controversies Around the South African Music Rights Organization
[Mike Palmedo] Struan Douglas has a recent article in Noseweek arguing that the South African Music Rights Organization (SAMRO) needs to operate under more transparency, and to be more closely regulated. He notes a “huge income inequality gap between top and bottom royalty earners”, and reports that 95 out of its 595 top royalty earners were “music publishers, most of whom were found to have been deregistered or nonexistent.” Douglas also reports that SAMRO has been charging license fees for public domain works. Click here for more.
