Workshops on South Africa’s Copyright Amendments Bill
[Sean Flynn] A Copyright Amendment Bill will be tabled in Parliament by the South African government proposing to reform the current system of copyright law in the country to include a “fair use” clause modeled on US law. American University Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) is visiting South Africa December 1 through 15 to participate in a series of workshops and lectures exploring how adoption of the proposed fair use standard may benefit creativity, innovation and development in the country. The workshops and presentations will include discussion of recommendations on the Bill submitted by legal scholars in a Joint Academic Submission on the Copyright Bill. Click here for more.
Opinion of the CEIPI on the European Commission’s Copyright Reform Proposal, With a Focus on the Introduction of Neighbouring Rights for Press Publishers in EU Law
[Christophe Geiger, Oleksandr Bulayenko and Giancarlo Frosio] Among its key features, the European Commission’s planned copyright reform proposes to introduce in EU copyright law neighbouring rights for press publishers.[1] This proposal is (i) contrary to the objective of creating a Single Digital Market, (ii) detrimental for authors’ interests, and (iii) does not solve any systemic issues of the EU copyright system for the reasons stated below. Click here for more.
316 Civil Society Groups to RCEP Negotiators: TPP Rules in RCEP Must Be Rejected
[Joint letter from 316 civil society groups based in countries negotiating RCEP] …The current negotiations in RCEP are complicated by the fact that there are 6 countries which are part of the TPP and there have been many attempts to import TPP texts into RCEP and sometimes even an attempt to go beyond the TPP. A few examples below bear testimony to how TPP wording is being proposed in RCEP. … In the leaked RCEP intellectual property (IP) chapter, Japan, South Korea and some others are pushing many of the main substantive stronger IP provisions of the TPP. Click here for more.
New Resource on Cross-Border Access to Knowledge
[Electronic Information for Libraries] IFL has compiled a booklet of statements made by librarians and archivists representing thousands of institutions at sessions of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR). Titled ‘The internet is global – but copyright exceptions stop at the border. Why we need an international treaty for cross-border access to knowledge’, the booklet includes statements by library and archive organizations made at WIPO SCCR sessions in April 2014, June 2014 and May 2016. WIPO is the main body that sets international copyright law. Click here for more.
World Health Organization Member State Mechanism Agrees to Drop “Counterfeit” Term
[Sangeeta Shashikant] The World Health Organization (WHO) Member State Mechanism (MSM) on substandard/spurious/falsely-labelled /falsified/counterfeit medical products (SSFFC) has agreed to recommend to the World Health Assembly (WHA) to drop the term “counterfeit” to refer to quality-compromised medical products. This decision was taken by the MSM in the context of refining the SSFFC definitions utilized by WHO, during its fifth meeting here on 23-25 November. This historic agreement follows years of often-intense dispute among WHO member states as to the appropriate terminologies that should be utilized to refer to unsafe medical products circulated by unscrupulous actors. Click here for more.
Copyright Protection and Cumulative Creation: Evidence from Early Twentieth Century Music
[Stephanie Holmes Didwania] Abstract: This paper uses data from an online database of music sampling to estimate the effect of copyright protection on the cumulative use of music. Using a unique panel dataset that links upstream and downstream music, I use regression analysis to examine the rates at which early twentieth-century musical works were used before and after entering the public domain over the years 1923-2013. The results suggest that copyright protection causes an upstream work to be used roughly 25 to 50 percent as often as it would if it was in the public domain after conditioning on upstream-song and downstream-year fixed effects. Placebo regressions in which the copyright expiration date is artificially shifted by two, five, and ten years yield no significant results, suggesting an immediate effect of copyright expiration on cumulative use. Click here for more.
