I arrived at WIPO yesterday for Day 1 which started at 12pm. The delegates and NGOs went for lunch at 1pm and the meeting started again in the afternoon. I’m not sure it was because of jetlag but the meeting did not make much sense. The Chair was re-elected (of course) and he just talked, talked and talked.
Day 2
PCDA Recommendations to 2007 General Assembly
(As adopted 9:38 pm June 15, 2007)
The PCDA decided to make the following recommendations to the 2007 General Assembly:
1. To adopt the recommendations for action in the agreed proposals contained in the Annex;
2. To immediately implement the recommendations contained in the list submitted by the Chair of the PCDA, in accordance with paragraph X of the Report of the Fourth Session of the PCDA;
3. A Committee on Development and IP be established immediately to:
This is Andrew Pollack’s recent story on Gilead’s new $130 per pill (use daily) for pulmonary arterial hypertension. The price of this drug, which is a once daily pill, is roughly the average per capita income in the United States, leaving nothing else for food, housing, clothing or having a beer at the local bar.
Ted Miller writes about sports in the Seattle PI (a paper I delivered door to door a long time ago). This is his column Intellectual property law begets insanity.
It is 7:40PM and the plenary has still not resumed on the final day of WIPO negotiations on Development Agenda. The final PCDA recommendations to the General Assembly are still being negotiated in the green room. Of the text reproduced here, the first six paragraphs have been agreed upon according to informed sources. The 7th paragraph is still under discussion. One would hope paragraph 4 of these PCDA recommendations would not preclude the ad hoc accreditation of intergovernmental organizations and non governmental organizations.
The John Edwards campaign has issued a statement endorsing prizes as an “alternative to patent monopolies” for new drugs and other inventions. Details from the campaign are here. This is a good start. My comment in the Huffington Post is here: John Edwards: Prizes, Not Patent Monopolies.
We have heard that negotiations have finished on Cluster D and E were wrapped up last evening. Cluster C has one issue pending. As of 10 AM Geneva time, only the text of Cluster D was available. Particularly significant is the agreement on the text of having WIPO Member States exchange information on experiences on open collaborative projects such as the Human Genome Project. Also important was the agreement on language on impact assessment studies.
The OECD High Level Forum to be held in the Netherlands on June 20 and 21, proposes to discuss new policy strategies to stimulate innovation for and access to medicines for neglected diseases. The meeting has on its face very laudable goals. But while NGOs have been invited to the HLF, they have not been given sufficient opportunity to contribute to the discussion Only one NGO has been invited to speak. By contrast other actors from academia and industry have been given multiple opportunities to present their views.
The following Cluster B text came out of the informal green room negotiations which broke out around 7 PM Geneva time last evening. The only word that seems to have brackets is the word “competition”.
1. In its activities, including norm-setting, WIPO should take into account the flexibilities in international IP agreements, especially those which are of interest to developing countries and LDCs.