I am in Montreal right now, and missed the Right Rights Coalition demonstration at the Authors Guild. Manon, Judit and Malini from our office are in NYC at the demonstration, and said it was incredibly moving. Several people at the protest sent reports by tweeter. The most complete was probably Abraham Lloyd. This was his account, with the Tweets organized from his first to last.
Patents and Standards
The United States thanks the International Bureau for preparing the background paper on Standards and Patents, and we support the statement made by Germany on behalf of Group B.
Mr. Chairman, the United States supports and strongly encourages the use of open standards, as traditionally defined, that is, those developed through an open, collaborative process, whether or not intellectual property is involved.
At the WIPO SCP coffee break, one attendee explained to KEI that the EU has in two places, (1) the regulations on tiered pricing, and (2) the implementation of the WTO’s 30 August 2003 decision on compulsory licensing, created an exception for goods in transit to developing countries.
On March 23, 2009, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI) organized a Briefing on Patents and Standards at WIPO’s 13th meeting of the Standing Committee on Patents (SCP). The meeting features presentations from Dr. Baisheng An, a Research Fellow at the South Centre, George Greve, President of Free Software Foundation Europoe (FSFE), Ahmed Abedel Latif, of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD), and James Love, Knowledge Ecology International (KEI). Continue Reading
This note discusses the issue of who should benefit from a WIPO treaty for reading disabled persons. Should it only be people who are blind and visually impaired, as some propose, or should it be more inclusive with regard to other disabilities?
The following report was prepared by KEI, and reviewed by Daniel Sepulveda of USTR:
KEI doing work on the transparency of global trade and treaty negotiations, particularly but not exclusively as relates to IPR negotiations.
One area that has received attention recently (after a year of complaints), seems to be recent USTR denial of access to the negotiating texts of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which is basically an IPR enforcement agreement only marginally related to the emotive title, “counterfeits.”
Michael Geist reports he has obtained under the Canada Access to Information Act” a confidential November 2008 memorandum written by Stockwell Day, the Canada Minister of International Trade, that says in part:
From the European Parliament is a call for more transparency of ACTA documents. This is a report from Sina Amoor Pour of Sweden, posted to the A2K listserve:
The following are some of the stories on the denial of the ACTA FOIA request on national security grounds.
March 12, 2009
https://www.keionline.org/blogs/2009/03/12/acta-state-secret/
Obama Administration Rules Texts of New IPR Agreement are State Secrets
Huffington Post, James Love, March 12, 2009.