Category Academic Resources

Comments to the United States Trade Representative Regarding South Africa Country Practice Review

PIJIP Director Sean Fiil-Flynn and North-West University Professor Klaus Beiter submitted comments to the U.S. Treade Representative related to the annual review of the eligibility of sub-Saharan African countries to receive the benefits of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Their submission counters claims made by the International Intellectual Property Alliance regarding South Africa’s compliance with international copyright treaties.

An International Instrument on Copyright and Educational Uses: Regulatory Models and Lessons

[Faith O. Majekolagbe and Giulia Priora] Abstract: There has been a renewed interest in the adoption of an international instrument on copyright and educational uses at the World Intellectual Property Organization since the COVID-19 pandemic which necessitated an unprecedented large-scale switch to digital education in many countries and brought to the fore the need to address copyright barriers to educational activities in physical and digital settings at the international level. This chapter primarily considers various legal models for copyright limitations and exceptions, specifically the fair use, fair dealing, and exhaustive list models, that could be explored and/or adopted in developing an appropriate international instrument on copyright limitations and exceptions for educational uses. It then draws lessons from the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled to buttress the need for an international instrument on educational uses of copyrighted works.

Meeting with WIPO Director General Daren Tang, Spotlights NGOs’ Crucial Role in Intellectual Property Landscape

[Andrés Izquierdo] On behalf of WCL PIJIP and the Global Network on Copyright User Rights, Andrés Izquierdo attended a meeting organized by Daren Tang, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization – WIPO. The meeting had the participation of more than 40 accredited NGOs and industry stakeholder groups. This meeting served to highlight the pivotal role played by NGOs in the Organization’s work. To the meeting also attended KEI, IFLA, and Innovarte.

The Value of Indian Patents: An Empirical Analysis Using Citation Lags Approach

[Mohammad Danish and Ruchi Sharma] Abstract: Our study examines whether the growth in patenting activity in India, spurred by policy changes such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs), is reflected in a corresponding increase in the ‘quality’ of Indian patents. To investigate this, we utilise 6,777 Indian patent data granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which were filed between 1984 and 2015.

South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill: Making Progress at the Provinces

[Sanya Samtani] Last week, in the latest instalment of South Africa’s copyright reform saga, the Select Committee on Trade and Industry, Economic Development, Small Business, Tourism, Employment and Labour at the National Council of Provinces (one of the houses of Parliament in South Africa), held a clause-by-clause vote on proposed amendments to the Copyright Amendment Bill [B13D-2017] (CAB) and Performers Protection Amendment Bill [B24-2016]. I summarise some of the salient outcomes of this vote below with regard to the CAB.

The Creative Commons Solution: Protecting Copyright in Short-Form Videos on Social Media Platforms

[Cheng-chi (Kirin) Chang] Abstract: The rapid development of short-form video social platforms, such as TikTok, has created huge commercial value but also highlights serious copyright infringement problems. Traditional "all rights reserved" protection models may not be adequate in this evolving creative landscape. The paper proposes the use of Creative Commons licenses as a solution to address the imbalance of rights between platforms and users.

Global Inequities In Access to COVID-19 Health Products and Technologies: A Political Economy Analysis

[Deborah Gleeson, Belinda Townsend, Brigitte F. Tenni, and Tarryn Phillips] Abstract: This paper presents a political economy analysis of global inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests. We adapt a conceptual model used for analysing the political economy of global extraction and health to examine the politico-economic factors affecting access to COVID-19 health products and technologies in four interconnected layers: the social, political, and historical context; politics, institutions, and policies; pathways to ill-health; and health consequences. Our analysis finds that battles over access to COVID-19 products occur in a profoundly unequal playing field, and that efforts to improve access that do not shift the fundamental power imbalances are bound to fail.

Geographic Isolation, Trade Secrecy, and Innovation

[Andrea Contigiani and Marco Testoni] Abstract: This paper studies the impact of geographic isolation on innovation. Geographically isolated regions have lower access to distant knowledge and, thus, may be less effective in producing innovation. In addition, this effect may be moderated by frictions in the labor market, such as trade secrecy protection, that hinder access to local knowledge. To explore this argument, we build a comprehensive dataset of US CBSAs for the period 1971–2014, combining data on travel time, trade secrecy protection, and patenting activity. We find that geographic isolation has a substantial negative impact on innovation quantity and quality. This relationship is at least partially explained by lower access to existing knowledge, as geographic isolation hinders collaboration and, to some extent, mobility. The negative effect is especially pronounced in regions characterized by strong trade secrecy protection. Overall, the evidence suggests that the combination of geographic isolation and trade secrecy protection is detrimental to the innovation performance of regions.

Generative AI and Author Remuneration

[Martin Senftleben] Abstract... The rights reservation option following from the regulation of text and data mining in the EU (Article 4 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market) could serve as a basis for a remuneration system focusing on the use of human creations for AI training purposes. Considering legal and practical difficulties arising from this approach, however, it is preferable to follow an alternative path and introduce a levy system that imposes a general payment obligation on providers of generative AI systems.

What AI Can Teach Us About Copyright and Fair Use

[Brandon Butler] The past six months or so have seen the seemingly sudden appearance of several startlingly powerful AI tools that create complex new textual and visual works in response to relatively simple prompts. You probably know at least a couple by name: ChatGPT (for text) and Stable Diffusion (for images) are the ones that seem to have taken over my social feeds. These tools are creating a buzz in part because the works they generate are sometimes good enough to pass for or replace the work of humans, at least in some contexts. This raises a laundry list of policy questions, some as old as the story of John Henry (will machines put humans out of work?), others as 21st-century as data sovereignty (how can nations govern data pertaining to their citizens when it flows seamlessly around the globe?).

Excluding Intellectual Property from Bilateral Trade and Investment Agreements: A Lesson from the Global Health Crisis

[Christophe Geiger] Abstract: This chapter critically analyses the inclusion of intellectual property (IP) in the investment chapters of free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties as well as their submission to their related investor state dispute settlement (ISDS). It argues that these developments pose a serious threat to a balanced and ethical innovation system. In part this is because when regulating IP to foster non-economic interests, the possibility of ISDS creates uncertainty about the ability of states to protect human rights and matters of public interest by limiting IP rights, even when such action is perfectly legitimated by the international IP system and its flexibilities.

Libraries, archives and museums call on WIPO to finalize the Toolkit on Preservation without further changes

[Electronic Information for Libraries] EIFL and the international library, archives and museum communities have called on WIPO to finalize the new Toolkit on Preservation (document SCCR/43/4) without making any further changes to the text. The call was made in response to an invitation to delegations at WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/43) to provide written comments on the Toolkit.