Sean Flynn GENEVA. At this week’s WIPO General Assembly, the United States for the first time alleged that the current draft of the WIPO Broadcast Treaty “exceeds the General Assembly mandate” that it be “signal-based” and...
Read MoreThe World Intellectual Property Organization adopted a landmark treaty mandating that members require disclosure of genetic resources (GR) and associated traditional knowledge (TK) in patent applications and limiting remedies...
Read MoreA President’s draft was announced in the 9pm session on May 22 of the of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s negotiation of a treaty (see infra) on “Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Traditional...
Read MoreArticle 6, including authorizations to revoke patents for a failure to disclose genetic resources (“GR”) or associated traditional knowledge (“TK”) has emerged as another contentious issue in this week’s negotiation of the World...
Read MoreSean M. Flynn, Director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property May 15, 2024 One of the hot topics in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) diplomatic conference on an instrument on “Intellectual...
Read MoreSean Flynn, James Love, Jonathan Band, Geneva, 2024 There is a significant push at this week’s meetings of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights to approve a...
Read MoreThe South African National Assembly has approved for the second time a sweeping copyright amendment bill that seeks to promote the interests of local creators and users of copyrighted content. The passage of the bill has...
Read MoreA group of copyright academics, creative and user stakeholders, and computational researchers adopted a new set of “Principles on Knowledge Governance”. The Principles seek to enable African and other Global South uses of...
Read MoreIn response to the invitation of the 44th Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights (aka User Rights Network), chaired by the Program on Information...
Read MoreSean Flynn, Director, PIJIP At this year’s Creative Commons (CC) Global Summit in Mexico City, a group of CC members “identified a set of common issues and values” on copyright and artificial intelligence. The ideas were...
Read MoreBy Sean Flynn Pedro Roffe Rosenfeld, the former Director of the UNCTAD-ICTSD Project on Intellectual Property and Development, and an important contributor to debates and policy making at the intersection of intellectual...
Read MoreMembers of the Access to Knowledge Coalition released an analysis of the major agenda items of the 44th session of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights that will take place in Geneva from 6-8 November 2023...
Read More[Sean Flynn] Today, on WIPO’s World IP Day, the Right to Research project is participating in two launches of products on text and data mining in Africa. Andres Izquierdo is at the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property supporting the African Group and their proposal of a pilot project on copyright and text and data mining for research institutions… I am at Strathmore University in Nairobi for a launch of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law’s report on Right to Research and Copyright Law in Kenya
Read More[Sean Flynn] The 43rd Meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights made substantial progress on issues of concern to a newly formed Access to Knowledge Coalition https://www.a2k-coalition.org/ These include the adoption of a work programme on limitations and exceptions, progress on the limitations and exceptions provision in the draft broadcast treaty, and the reviving of a second meeting of the SCCR. These advances were promoted in part by changes in representation from Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Argentina and the continuing expertise and leadership within the African Group.
Read More[Sean Flynn] Where allowed by copyright law, digital uses for education, research and cultural heritage are contributing to social and economic development. This document describes some recent developmental uses of copyright limitations and exceptions that are relevant to the issues being discussed at the 43rd meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights. The examples were collected by members of the Access to Knowledge Coalition.
Read More[Sean Flynn] I submit the following comments on limitations and exceptions issues in agenda items for the 43rd Meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights… The current draft of the Broadcast Treaty continues to raise important public interest concerns. Although the mandate of the Committee is to work on a “signal based” approach, the treaty continues to use a rights-based structure and language modeled on the Rome Convention rather than the more appropriate Brussels Convention. The use of a rights-based model causes particular problems of layering rights on top of each other because broadcast signals normally carry copyrighted content. Although there is now on opt-out in Article 10 – permitting alternative effective regulatory means – the dominance of the rights based perspective in the drafting will encourage adoption of its model.
Read MoreThe 43rd meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights will consider a Second Revised Draft Text for the WIPO Broadcasting Organizations Treaty (“Second Revised Draft”). A question that is likely to be posed is whether the text contains sufficient consensus to move toward a diplomatic conference. Considerable questions have been raised about the need for and scope of rights in an anti-piracy treaty that would ultimately cover content of signals that are already protected by other copyright and related rights treaties, for example by KEI and Professor Bern Hugenholtz. This note focuses on the limitations and exceptions provisions of the Second Revised Draft. For comments embedded in a redlined version of the Draft showing changes from the version presented in SCCR 42, see PIJIP’s redlined version of the Second Revised Draft.
Read More[Sean Flynn] The Right to Research in International Copyright Project hosted a week of conferences in South Africa, January 23-27, 2023. The week of public and private meetings in Pretoria and Cape Town featured discussions of how African researchers are using modern digital technologies to address a range of pressing research questions that require use of research exceptions in copyright law. Academics, practicing lawyers and government officials from several African countries provided the legal and policy context for the researchers’ work, illuminating both the flexibility in many African laws that permit research uses, as well as where changes in domestic and international law could serve the public interest.
Read More[Sean Flynn and Lokesh Vyas] Last week, Science Magazine published a joint academic opinion by leading copyright scholars from around the world calling for copyright reform to enable text and data mining (TDM) research. The opinion calls for all countries to evaluate their laws, and for international institutions to guide them, so that text and data mining research can take place everywhere, including through cross-border collaborations between researchers in different countries. In this article, we survey some of the kinds of important TDM projects that need copyright permission to be enabled everywhere.
Read More[Sean Flynn] In a huge court victory that may assist human rights and IP advocacy, the SA Constitutional Court released a quite remarkable judgment today that “reads in” the copyright amendment bill’s disability provisions into the current law because of the long delay in passing the bill. The Court finds that the lack of disability exceptions in current law violates the equality right of people with disabilities. It also finds a violation of free expression rights that uses reasoning with broader import.
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