Author: Mike Palmedo

Top Trade Officials from US and South Africa to Meet Over Copyright Amendments Bill Dispute

The Daily Maverick reports that South African Minister of Trade and Industry Ebrahim Patel and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will soon meet to discuss a dispute over South Africa’s proposed Copyright Amendments Bill. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has launched a formal review of South Africa’s trade benefits through the General System of Preferences (GSP), to investigate whether the Amendments violate the GSP’s eligibility criterion that beneficiary countries provide” provide adequate and effective protection of intellectual property rights.” It is doing so at the request of the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a US-based trade group representing publishers.

Read More

IIPA Petition Leads USTR to Review South Africa’s GSP Benefits

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.

Read More

Article Highlights Controversies Around the South African Music Rights Organization

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.

Read More

USTR Seeks Comments For Annual Report on Foreign Trade Barriers

The U.S. Trade Representative has called for comments for the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (NTE). The report, published each year “sets out an inventory of the most significant foreign barriers affecting U.S. exports of goods and services, including agricultural commodities, U.S. intellectual property, U.S. foreign direct investment by U.S. persons, especially if such investment has implications for trade in goods or services, and U.S. electronic commerce.”

Read More

Former USTR Official: USMCA Can Be Amended If U.S. Wants To Pass A Law Violating Its Obligations

Former Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Mariam Sapiro has written a memo for the Pass USMCA Coalition arguing that the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) would not prevent a future Congress from shortening the period of marketing exclusivity granted to new biologic medicines in the U.S. She argues that the countries could amend the agreement if the U.S. wanted to pass a law in violation of its current obligations.

Read More

Microsoft Releases Draft Data Sharing Agreements

Today Microsoft released three draft data sharing agreements for comment. They are intended to help individuals and organizations share data in order to “address some of society’s biggest challenges and help individuals and organizations be more innovative, efficient, and productive.” The agreements are crafted with an eye towards use in the context of training artificial intelligence models.

Read More

The Impact of Copyright Exceptions for Researchers on Scholarly Output

Abstract: High prices restrict access to academic journals and books that scholars rely upon to author new research. One possible solution is the expansion of copyright exceptions allowing unauthorized access to copyrighted works for researchers. I test the link between copyright exceptions for health and science researchers and their publishing output at the country-subject level. I find that scientists residing in countries that implement more robust research exceptions publish more papers and books in subsequent years. This relationship between copyright exceptions and publishing is stronger in lower-income countries, and stronger where there is stricter copyright protection of existing works.

Read More

Senate HELP Committee Seeks Comments on Lower Health Care Costs Act of 2019

The leaders of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions have released draft healthcare legislation for comment. The Lower Health Care Costs Act of 2019 contains five titles, one of which is titled Lowering the Costs of Prescription Drugs. This title contains sections meant to speed the introduction of biosimilars to the the market; to reduce abuses of citizen petitions to block generic entry; to enhance the transparency of IP for biologics through changes to the Purple Book; and to “modernize” the Orange Book.

Read More

Chile, New Zealand and Singapore Launch Digital Economy Partnership (DEPA) Talks

The trade ministers from Chile, New Zealand and Singapore have announced a new set of trade negotiations at this month’s APEC meeting – the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (“DEPA”). Their statement says “The DEPA seeks to deepen and strengthen cooperation in digital areas, establish new international approaches for digital trade issues, and explore new frontiers in the digital economy, such as digital identities, e-payments, cross-border data flows and artificial intelligence.”

Read More

May 20: Webinar on the USMCA (NAFTA 2.0) and Access to Medicines

How will the recently-concluded United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) impact access to affordable medicines? The USMCA – the renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (also commonly referred to as NAFTA 2.0) – incorporates many of the harmful provisions from the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), including patent provisions that were suspended by the remaining Parties following the withdrawal of the US. It goes even further than the TPP in extending the exclusivities for biologics to ten years, an unprecedented TRIPS-plus measure. Beyond the intellectual property chapter, multiple other chapters and provisions of the USMCA also have implications for access to affordable, safe and effective medicines.

Read More

TB activists for first time challenge TB drug patent in India, in bid to prevent J&J from extending monopoly

[MSF Press Release] Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is supporting a patent challenge filed in India this week by two tuberculosis survivors, to prevent pharmaceutical corporation Johnson & Johnson (J&J) from extending its monopoly on the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline. Nandita Venkatesan from Mumbai, India and Phumeza Tisile from Khayelitsha, South Africa, who filed the patent challenge at the Mumbai Patent Office, both survived drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) but lost their hearing because of the toxicity of the treatment. They are now fighting to ensure that newer drugs like bedaquiline – which are safer and more effective – are made affordable and accessible to everybody with DR-TB, to replace painful and toxic drugs that need to be injected.

Read More

Comment for the 2019 Special 301 Review

…PIJIP’s research indicates that American firms in industries that rely on copyright limitations enjoy better outcomes when our trading partners’ limitations are more like fair use. Specifically, US firms in technology and related sectors do better in countries where copyright exceptions permit fair uses and practices of any type of work, by any user, and for any purpose – as long as the use itself is fair to the owner.

Read More

USMCA Would Better Serve U.S. Interests with the Addition of a Copyright Balance Provision

[Comments to the International Trade Commission on the economic impact of the USMCA] Last year, we submitted comments to USTR regarding negotiating objectives for US-Mexico-Canada Agreement in which we recommended that U.S. negotiators seek a copyright provision that balances the interest of rightholders and users of copyrighted works… Unfortunately, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement does not include a copyright balancing provision. By excluding the provision, the United States loses an opportunity to promote the interests of firms in some of its most innovative sectors.

Read More

Pharmaceutical Import Prices Rise More Rapidly After Countries Enact Data Exclusivity

This post will demonstrate that prices of pharmaceutical imports have grown more quickly after countries adopted data exclusivity in their laws. It is also intended to show that trade data can be a useful source of information for studies of drug pricing. The post is based on my presentation given at pre-Global Congress workshop on empirical research into the effect of TRIPS-Plus trade agreements on access to medicines.

Read More

PROMOTING COPYRIGHT BALANCE IN A US-EU TRADE AGREEMENT

[Sean Flynn and Mike Palmedo] Comments to USTR – re: Negotiating Objectives for a U.S.-European Union Trade Agreement: PIJIP is managing a multidisciplinary research project on the impact of copyright user rights in the digital environment. One issue that the United States and the European Union face in their upcoming negotiations is the degree to which they should seek to include language promoting copyright balance through limitations and exceptions in the agreement. We make this statement to share information from our research indicating that the promotion of balanced copyright systems promotes U.S. trade interests. … We also provide the results of research on existing language in trade and international law that promote balance in copyright laws and include some analysis of how such provisions could better meet U.S. interests.

Read More

Secondary Liability and Safe Harbors for Internet Service Providers

This is the second in a series of blogs comparing copyright and technology provisions in eight trade agreements: TPP, CPTPP, USMCA, CETA, RCEP, EU-Mercosur FTA, EU-Japan FTA and the China-Korea FTA. The previous post discussed provisions calling for copyright ‘balance’ and addressing the circumvention of technological protection measures. This one looks at the provisions requiring secondary liability for internet service providers (ISPs) and allowing-or-requiring safe harbors from such liability.

Read More

Follow

Facebook     Twitter

PIJIP

infojustice.org is  hosted by the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University Washington College of Law.

Infojustice Roundup

Free to Share

RSS Comments on:

  • An error has occurred, which probably means the feed is down. Try again later.

RSS Civil Society Documents

  • An error has occurred, which probably means the feed is down. Try again later.

RSS Comments on:

  • An error has occurred, which probably means the feed is down. Try again later.