Author: James Love

USPTO has issued a press release, announcing the appointment of Michelle K. Lee as Deputy Director of the USPTO, beginning in January 13, 2014. Currently Lee is the Director of the USPTO’s Silicon Valley satellite office. The White House reportedly wanted to appoint Lee as the Director, but may have seen the Deputy position as less controversial. For the near future, Lee will be running the USPTO, and will be the most sophisticated person as regards technology to do so, at least in our memory. According to the USPTO Press Release:
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STATEMENT OF THE MINISTERS AND HEADS OF DELEGATION FOR THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP COUNTRIES
December 10, 2013
Singapore

We, the Ministers and Heads of Delegation for Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam, have just completed a four-day Ministerial meeting in Singapore where we have made substantial progress toward completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement.

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Professor Joseph Stiglitz has written an open letter to the TPP negotiators, asking that they resist proposals to weaken consumer rights in intellectual property. The letter identifies 12 specific “grave risks” in the IP Chapter, and calls upon negotiators to publish the investor state dispute resolution text.

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USTR recently asked KEI if there were areas in the IP Chapter where we approved of the positions taken by USTR, and the answer is, yes. Given how critical we have been about the text, I will mention a few here.

USTR now “supports a more flexible approach under which partners could retain reasonable patent pre-grant opposition procedures.” This is welcome, and useful.

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In a word, MSF is disappointed.

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On November 28, 2013, I wrote a blog about the problems in using the World Bank’s definition of high income, in the specifc context of a proposal by the United States to use this as a measure of which countries in the TPP should have lower standards for intellectual property rights on medical inventions. (See: https://www.keionline.org/node/1834).

Here a different metric is presented, based upon relative incomes, benchmarked against the five highest income countries in the TPP with a population of more than 1 million persons.

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In a December 2, 2013 letter, Senator Orrin Hatch wrote to USTR’s Michael Froman, suggesting TPP exclude any countries that do not meet “high levels of ambition.” According to Hatch, these high ambitions include agreeing to 12 years of exclusive rights for IPR in biologic drug test data, and the elimination of barriers to cross border data flows (a privacy issue). A copy of the Hatch letter is attached below.

The timing of the Hatch letter is designed to pressure countries meeting in Singapore on December 7-10 in the TPP negotiation, on these two contentious issues.

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I missed this news earlier. Here is a report from IP-Watch:

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