September 30, 2009.
USPTO FOIA Officer
United States Patent and Trademark Office
PO Box 1450
Alexandria, VA 22313-1450
efoia@uspto.govDear FOIA Officer:
This note concerns two areas of policy concerning humanitarian uses of patents. (1), a recommended exception to patent rights for humanitarian uses, and (2), the licensing of patents for humanitarian uses. Both examples focus on access to essential medical technologies.… Continue Reading
Sergio Marchi
Ambassador Marchi was the Chair of the WTO General Council during the negotiation on Doha Paragraph 6.
Before (or after) reading these accounts of FOIA requests to USTR, you might also review the transparency memorandum issued by President Obama in January 2009.
The following are some recent FOIA requests for USTR:
The following is the text that was prepared in 2005 as a
possible basis for a treaty on Access to Knowledge. The text
was prepared in response to an August 2004 proposal by Argentina
and Brazil for a WIPO Development Agenda, that included in its
original proposal, a possible treaty on access to knowledge. The
process that created this specific draft text included three
elements.
Section IV of Part III of the TRIPS Agreement impose certain obligations to WTO Member States relating to border measures that may require custom authorities interventions in cases of importation of infringing goods. However, as the rest of Part III it also allows considerable flexibility to WTO Members States in implementing its obligations.
May 28th, 2007 by James Love
Written by Judit Rius Sanjuan
The most important international intellectual property agreement regulating remedies for intellectual property infringement is the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement).
What Are Counterfeit Medicines?
The definition of a counterfeit medicine is not well established. In 1992, the WHO defined a counterfeit medicine as: “a medicine which is deliberately and fraudulently mislabelled with respect to identity and/or source." Under this definition, it is the deliberate mislabeling of a drug or medicine which makes it a counterfeit. The US FDA uses a similar definition,
To provide some context to discussions on the term of protection for copyright and related rights, the following note sumarizes on the basic provisions in various multilateral copyright and related rights treaties, on the topics of minimum terms and formalities. … Continue Reading