Hearings on South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill (B13-2017)
This week the South African Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry will hold three days of hearings on the Copyright Amendment Bill (B13-2017). Witnesses will give 20-minute presentations, followed by 20 minutes of Q&A. The hearings will be held on August 1, 2 and 4, and the testimony will be open to the public. The hearing schedule is available here. PIJIP’s collection of written statements to the Committee on the Copyright Amendment Bill is here.
UCT IP Unit co-publishes IP, Innovation and Development paper authored by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz et al.
[University of Cape Town IP Unit Press Release] Together with two institutions in India and Brazil, UCT’s IP Unit has just co-published a paper with the title ‘Innovation, Intellectual Property and Development: A Better Set of Approaches for the 21st Century.’ The paper is authored by Dean Baker, Associate Professor Arjun Jayadev and Nobel Prize winner and former Chief Economist of the World Bank Professor Joseph E. Stiglitz. … the authors state that “[i]f the knowledge economy and the economy of ideas is to be a key part of the global economy and if static societies are to be transformed into ‘learning societies’ that are key for growth and development, there is a desperate need to rethink the current [intellectual property] regime and to allow for a much less restrictive flow of information and knowledge. Moreover, if we are considering questions of ethics, the current regime is deeply regressive and inefficient.” Click here for more.
RCEP IP Chapter: A Serious Threat to Access to Knowledge/ Cultural Goods?
[Arul George Scaria and Anubha Sinha] Negotiators from sixteen countries are currently meeting in Hyderabad for discussing a free trade agreement titled Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Looking at the latest available IP chapter (leak dated October 15, 2015), RCEP stands to adversely affect nearly half of the world’s population on areas like access to knowledge and access to medicines. We would like to highlight five issues related to access to knowledge/cultural goods, based on the leaked IP chapter. Click here for the full story at LiveLaw.in.
Italian ISPs Say new Copyright Amendment Infringes Human Rights
[Andy] A copyright amendment approved by the Italian authorities breaches the EU convention on human rights, an ISP organization has warned. The law allows the Italian Communications Regulatory Authority to issue “take down, stay down” instructions to websites listing allegedly infringing content but without intervention from the judiciary. After being spoken of in unfavorable terms by the United States Trade Representative in its Special 301 Reports, Italy achieved a sudden breakthrough in 2014. Click here for more.
EU Committee on Culture and Education Wants Educators to Pay for Content That They Now Use for Free
[Alek Tarkowski and Teresa Nobre] Last week, the Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) of the European Parliament voted on its final opinion concerning the Commission’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Copyright law in the shape proposed by the CULT MEPs would spell disaster for educators and educational institutions across Europe. Click here for more.
A Comparative Analysis of the Secondary Liability of Online Service Providers
[Graeme Dinwoodie] Abstract: This Chapter analyzes the secondary liability of online service providers from a comparative perspective, drawing on national reports on the question submitted to the Annual Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law. The Chapter highlights two different approaches to establishing the circumstances when an intermediary might be liable: a “positive” or “negative” definition of the scope of liability. The former flows from the standards for establishing liability; the latter grows out of the different safe harbour provisions that immunize intermediaries operating in particular ways, although there can obviously be connections between the standard for liability and the conditions for immunity. Click here for more.
