On December 9, 2009, Wikileaks posted five sensitive documents related to the WHO Expert Working Group (EWG) on R&D Financing:
a non-public draft report of the WHO EWG a non-public Comparative Analysis done by the EWG the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) Overview of the EWG Comparative Analysis an IFPMA summary slide on the EWG Draft Report
The following is a letter sent by Cecilia López Montaño, a member of the WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing to the WHO Executive Board:
Dear members of the Executive Board:
I am Cecilia López Montaño, senator of the Colombian Congress and member of the Expert Working Group on Research and Development Financing of the World Health Organization, in representation of the point of view of developing countries, I assume.
The World Health Organization’s Expert Working Group on R&D Financing spent scant attention on how to raise money, but showed considerable interest in how to spend it. The clear favorite approach is to give grants to product development partnerships — the approach that has now become the most conventional approach, and one not surprisingly endorsed by the PDPs themselves, and also by the Gates Foundation and the IFPMA — two groups that are often seen as devoted to protecting the status quo in terms of intellectual property and business models for innovation.
Senator Wyden has written to the USTR posing 11 questions aiming to clarify the specific objectives of the Anti Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The next round of negotiations are scheduled to take place in Mexico during the week of January 25. The letter is available here. Continue Reading
Below is the language of paragraph 7 of the draft conclusions of SCCR 19 contained in the “Draft Conclusions Version 2.0” document distributed this morning:
Statement of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, on the matter of the Treaty for the Blind, Visually Impaired and other Reading Disabled, proposed by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay.
16th December, 2009
In discussions about a possible WIPO Treaty for persons who are blind or have other reading disabilities, there have been suggestions by some that voluntary licensing by rights holders presents a sufficient solution to the problem. I studied several publications since 1985 to take a closer look at this viewpoint and find out what were the common perceptions.
Today, KEI as a member of the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) participated in a meeting of the EU-US IPR Enforcement Working Group in Washington DC. Attendees included several government and industry representatives, and only a handful of civil society participants.
The agenda addressed several IPR enforcement topics such as ACTA, seizure of generic medicines in transit, WHO Resolution WHA 61.21, climate change, customs regulations and country/region specific issues.
Date: September 10, 2009
On September 10, 2009 KEI hosted a brownbag lunch to discuss the scope of patentable subject matter, focusing specifically on the implications for life-science patents of the Supreme Court’s forthcoming review of the Bilski Federal Circuit opinion. This is the first time since 1981 that the US Supreme Court will address the limits of patentable subject matter.
The key U.S. statue on this issue is Section 101 of the patent law:
35 USC 101. Inventions patentable
Today Meredith Filak and I filed comments with the LOC Copyright Office and the USPTO on the importance of access to foreign works for reading disabled persons. A pdf of the comments are on the web here.
The comment is filed with a lot of data, including, for example: