Knowledge Ecology International

Thursday, 21 May 2009

Delegates at the World Health Assembly will have to grapple with how best to deploy their delegations to simultaneously cover pandemic influenza and resolving the outstanding elements of the WHO IGWG Plan of Action.

Today’s WHO Journal lists the following morning schedule for Committee A.

Item 11 (continued) Medium-strategic plan, including Proposed Programme budget 2010-2011

To consider appropriation resolution for financial period 2010-2011

Item 12 (continued) Technical and health matters

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This morning a draft Resolution proposed by the Delegations of Canada, Chile, Iran (Islamic Republic), Japan, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Norway and Switzerland was distributed to the 62nd WHA as document A62/A/Conf.Paper No.4

If approved in its current form, the resolution will conclude the Plan of Action with the stakeholders, time frames and progress indicators proposed by the documents distributed by the WHO PHI secretariat this week.

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May 18, 2009

Open Letter to WHO Member States on outstanding components of Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property

Dear WHO Member States,

During the 2008 World Heath Assembly WHO Member States reached unanimous consensus on resolution WHA 61.21 that adopted a Global Strategy and unfinished Plan of Action on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual property.

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On Monday, 18 May 2009, WHO released document A62/16 Add.3 entitled “Open paragraphs on stakeholders“.

The link for this document is: http://apps.who.int/gb/ebwha/pdf_files/A62/A62_16Add3-en.pdf

The cover sheet of this document states:

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I spent a few minutes today on Amazon, to check on reports that some Kindle titles now have text to speech disabled. Among the authors who are “turning off” text to speech in Kindle editions of books are President Obama, Vice President Biden, Toni Morrison, the Pope, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, Mother Teresa, Isaac Asimov, Tom Brokaw, P.D. James, Robert B. Reich, George Will and Ann Coulter, to mention a few.

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KEI has a page that summarizes the minimum terms of protection for copyright and related rights in multilateral treaties. The most binding constraints are those included in the WTO TRIPS Agreement. Those constraints are as follows:

Most literary and artistic works protected by copyright under the Berne would have a minimum copyright term calculated on the basis of the life of the author plus 50 years.

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Update #2, 15 May: Yesterday, Random House began to disable TTS on books in the Kindle store, which is our primary concern. However, it appears that early reports from the Amazon message boards of remote disabling may have been inaccurate; there have been no confirmed reports of TTS being remotely disabled, and we apologize for any confusion. However, the technology to remotely disable these works does exist, and this remains a significant concern.

Two major points to bear in mind as this story progresses:

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The contributions from WHO Member States and other Stakeholders to the Expert Working Group on R&D financing are now available on the WHO website.

The following extract is taken from the WHO public hearing website:

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In efforts to introduce the topic of innovation inducement prizes into the discussions about drug development, there are inevitably questions about the relationship between grants and prizes.

In some cases, prizes are being offered as a reform of “pull” mechanisms, and can usefully be compared to the grant of a marketing monopoly, which is the primary pull mechanism used today. In this context, a question is, should drug or vaccine developers be rewarded with monopolies or cash? And if cash, where does the money come from, and how much money is given to a particular project?

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May 8, 2009

The following text was submitted by the Like-Minded Group (India, Indonesia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Egypt) on Friday, 8 May 2009, for consideration by the PCT Working Group. It is a best endeavor to consolidate the four proposals made yesterday by the African Group, Group B, GRULAC and the aforementioned like-minded Group.

CONSOLIDATED PROPOSALS FOR CHAIR’S SUMMARY

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