The following intervention was delivered by Brazil on behalf of the Development Agenda Group at the Forty-Second (22nd Extraordinary) Session of the WIPO General Assembly on 17 December 2012.
Yesterday I received a Samsung laptop computer running Google’s Chrome OS. This is the new $249 Chromebook with an SSD drive, 2 gigs of RAM, an 11.6 inch 1366 x 768 pixels screen, and the 1.7 GHz Exynos 5200 processor. The laptop weights 2.4 pounds and has a nice usable keyboard and a well implemented trackpad. There is also the option of a model with 2 years of 3G (limited) data from Verizon, for just $329. Continue Reading
On 3 December 2012, the 15th round of negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) began in Auckland, Newe Zealand and included, for the first time, eleven negotiating parties with the additions of Canada and Mexico more than a year after these two countries formally asked to join the negotiations. The current negotiating parties now include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States, and Vietnam. Rumored interested countries include Japan, Thailand and South Korea. Continue Reading
On Monday, December 10, 2012, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) filed an amicus brief in a case before the Supreme Court of the United States involving application of the patent exhaustion doctrine to self-replicating technology. KEI filed in support of the petitioner, urging the Supreme Court to find that the patent exhaustion doctrine does in fact apply to self-replicating technology and that the patent holder’s rights in the present case were exhausted with the sale of the first-generation of the technology, in this case a seed. Continue Reading
The United States proposal for the TPPA includes many demands that will increase intellectual property rights for rightholders. The leaked text reveals that the United States seeks to introduce numerous measures that go well beyond the requirements of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), known as TRIPS-plus provisions. Some of the areas of concern include the provisions on intellectual property enforcement. Continue Reading