Statement of KEI on announcement that there is a consensus on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement
October 5, 2015, 10am, EST
These comments by James Love, KEI Director
Press Release: Coalition for Affordable T-DM1 Asks the UK Government to Employ Crown Use Authority to Lower Price of Expensive Cancer Drug sold by Roche
CONTACT:
Diarmaid McDonald
email: accessdiarmaid@gmail.com
+44.7894.4557.81
Susannah Markandya
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Zack Struver
email: zack.struver@keionline.org
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On September 28, 2012, nearly three years ago, KEI submitted a FOIA request to USTR for “all documents relating to the World Health Organization (WHO) consideration of an agreement or treaty to support medical R&D.”
Three years later USTR has released 89 pages of documents, with some redactions. But USTR also withheld 64 documents pursuant to FOIA exemption 552(b)(5) and three documents pursuant to FOIA exemption 552(b)(1).
This is a video by Zack Struver about Senator Bernie Sander’s proposal to expand Veterans access to patented medical inventions. The video discusses both the proposal by Senator Sanders to give the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs the authority to… Continue Reading
On June 4, 2015, KEI asked USTR to provide the names of the TPP Chapters. The contents of the chapters are all officially secret, but we thought the names of the chapters should be public, and made a request for the chapter names under the Freedom of Information Act (FIOA). Today, more than 3 months later, USTR has responded to that FOIA. According to USTR, as of September 10, 2015, the names of the TPP Chapters are as follows:
KEI TPP Briefing Note: Conflicts with US legal norms and TPP Article QQ.H.4: {Civil Procedures and Remedies / Civil and Administrative Procedures and Remedies} (*based upon May 11, 2015 TPP negotiating text.
Draft September 9, 2015
These were comments KEI provided to the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), for its consultation on expanding the mandate to include drugs to treat the hepatitis C virus.
To: consultation@medicinespatentpool.org.
Date: August 28, 2015
Re: Comments by James Love on behalf of KEI for the consultation regarding the MPP mandate to expand into HCV (and other diseases).
KEI has submitted joint comments with UAEM in this consultation. Here on behalf of KEI I make a few additional points.
Five groups, the Authors Alliance, Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) and New Media Rights have written to Ambassador Froman at USTR, asking that the TPP not adopt measures that would prevent the Congress from enacting legislation to limit the remedies for copyright infringement that were proposed by the Register of Copyrights in June 2015, to expand access to orphan copyrighted works.
A copy of the letter is available here:
On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, the Senate Veterans Committee held a mark-up to consider several bills. During the mark-up, Senator Sanders offered an amendment, attached below, that would create a compulsory license mechanism in the Department of Veterans Affairs, for patents on medical inventions. (See amendment text below). The motivation for the amendment was a crisis in the VA involving access to drugs for the hepatitis C virus (HCV).