Joint Appeal by 388 Members of the European Parliament and of European National Parliaments Urging the EU and its Member States to Support a TRIPS Waiver
…One year after the adoption of the first lockdown measures in Europe, it is clear that we must urgently and exponentially increase manufacturing and availability of vaccines, tests, medicines and protective materials, and that requires wider sharing of proprietary technology and knowhow, data and resources, especially with low- and middle-income countries. We stand with the Director-General of the World Health Organization, over 100 national governments, hundreds of civil society organizations, and trade unions, and join them in urging the European Commission and EU member states to discuss at the highest levels and support the temporary waiver of certain obligations under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Click here for more.
See also: Webinar sponsored by HAI, MSF, Public Citizen, Public Eye and the Third World Network. [May 4, 3:30 pm CEST] – High Level Dialogue Trips Waiver: If Not Now, Then When? Link.
PIJIP Webinar: John Willinsky – Restoring Copyright’s Ability “To Promote The Progress of Science”
[May 14, 2021 | 11:00am EDT | 15:00 UTC] John Willinsky will present his argument from a forthcoming book from MIT Press for reforming the United States Copyright Act to support universal open access to research publications… The argument proceeds in five steps: 1. Scholarly publishing’s principal stakeholders (including the big publishers) are now in agreement that open access to research publications does more for the progress of science than persisting with the subscriptions of the print era. 2. This consensus places current copyright law in violation of the Constitution, for the law cannot “promote the progress of science” if publishers can only exercise their “exclusive right” by restricting access, which impedes scientific progress… Click here for more, and to register.
Expanding the Production of COVID-19 Vaccines to Reach Developing Countries: Lift the Barriers to Fight the Pandemic in the Global South
[Carlos Correa] The unfolding of COVID-19 has shown that the international system has been unable to ensure equal access to the vaccines and other products necessary to fight the pandemic. While the need for a strong response remains obvious, proposals for scaling up the production of COVID-19 vaccines across the globe are still blocked in the World Trade Organization. Click here for more.
Not the African Copyright Pirate Is Perverse, But the Situation in Which (S)he Lives – Textbooks for Education, Extraterritorial Human Rights Obligations, and Constitutionalization “From Below” in IP Law
[Klaus Beiter] …This Article will demonstrate the significance of extraterritorial state obligations (ETOs) for IP law. It focuses on the issue of how the right to education under international human rights law prescribes requirements that international copyright law must comply with to facilitate access to textbooks in schools and universities. Drawing on the expert Maastricht Principles on Extraterritorial Obligations of States in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 2011, and applying the well-known tripartite typology of state obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights, the ETOs concept will be introduced and twenty typical ETOs under the right to education in the international copyright context that safeguard access to printed textbooks will be identified. A final central aim of the Article will be to explain how exactly, within international law as a unified system, ETOs can lead to a “constitutionalization” of IP law. Although the discussion relates to issues of accessibility in developing countries more generally, the dire situation of access to textbooks in education in Africa strongly motivated this research. Click here for more.
Too Small to Matter? On the Copyright Directive’s Bias in Favour of Big Right-Holders
[Martin Husovec and João Quintais] Abstract: Copyright law is about recognising the author’s material and non-material interests and setting the incentives for creativity right. The legislative changes in this area increasingly look as if simple linearity governs the world: what we take away from some, we automatically give away in equal part to others. The idea of redistribution is noticeable in recent legislative developments. Art. 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (DSM Directive) is the latest policy intervention to prove this point. According to its logic, imposing stricter liability on some online gatekeepers will automatically improve the position and revenues for all right-holders. This chapter explores the flaws in such an approach by highlighting how the excessive focus of Art. 17 on big right-holders neglects and harms smaller creators. Click here for more.
TRIPS-Plus Rules in International Trade Agreements and Access to Medicines: Chinese Perspectives and Practices
[Boston University GDP Center] As Han Bing demonstrates in a new working paper, China has now implemented several of the TRIPS-plus legal standards demanded under free trade agreements today, partly due to external factors and partly due to a desire to foster its own innovation in pharmaceuticals. The most important and long-standing of such standards is China’s data exclusivity law, which keeps generic manufacturers from relying on the underlying test data from the innovative product to gain marketing approval for at least six years (12 years for biologics). Although the outcomes of these policies are mixed, the data on data exclusivity has had some decidedly negative consequences. Chinese pharmaceutical companies continue to struggle to break into the global market and in at least one case, data exclusivity kept a key treatment for Hepatitis C out of the domestic market, even though the product was not patentable under Chinese law. Click here for more.
