[Last update, April 13, 2020, 9am EST] 149 organizations and 358 individuals have endorsed a civil society letter to WIPO Director General Francis Gurry urging the organization to "take a clear stand in favour of ensuring that intellectual property regimes are a support, and not a hindrance, to efforts to tackle both the Coronavirus outbreak and its consequences."
...Access to affordable medicines, vaccines and diagnostics and to medical equipment, and to the technologies to produce them, is indispensable to treat COVID-19. Such technologies should be broadly available to manufacture and supply what is needed to address the disease... In this connection, I wish to recall that in accordance to the ‘Security Exceptions’ contained in Article 73(b) of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), any World Trade Organization Member can take “any action which it considers necessary for the protection of its essential security interests”. The use of this exception will be fully justified to procure medical products and devices or to use the technologies to manufacture them as necessary to address the current health emergency.
In March, 2020, two engineers in Brescia, Italy used a desktop 3D printing machine to fabricate needed replacement valves for more than 100 ventilator machines being used to treat coronavirus patients at a local hospital. News reports claim that the ventilator valves fabricated in Italy for a cost of about 1 Euro each were previously sold by the manufacturer for 10,000 Euro each. There is some debate about what happened next, but early news feeds reported that a parts manufacturer threatened to sue the engineers for infringing patents on the replacement valve. While the existence of the threat and the patents remains murky, the incident sparked legal commentary regarding the risk that volunteers fabricating parts for lifesaving devices, and the hospitals that use them, could be liable for patent infringement.
We write to you as organisations and individuals representing researchers, educators, students, and the institutions that support them, to encourage WIPO to take a clear stand in favour of ensuring that intellectual property regimes are a support, and not a hindrance, to efforts to tackle both the Coronavirus outbreak and its consequences. The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright light on how important intellectual property limitations and exceptions can be to development and human flourishing. Researchers discovered the spread of the virus through a text and data mining project analyzing copyrighted news articles, enabled by Canada’s flexible fair dealing right for research purposes. The earliest potential treatments have been developed through existing medicines, enabled by experimental use exceptions to patent rights.
[Mike Palmedo and Margarita Gorospe] As schools have closed in response to the Coronavirus 19 pandemic, interest in online learning has increased dramatically. Online learning often involves distributing copyrighted works online, so its governed by copyright limitations that vary widely from one country to the next. Some countries allow teachers, parents, and/or students to share works or parts of works online for educational purposes. Other countries do not, or place different types of conditions on the limitation.
[Interview by Victoria Heath and Brigitte Vézina]...When time is of the essence, like now with the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific research results must be made available as soon as possible so that other scientists, policymakers and the general population can rely on sound scientific data in their decision-making process. Contrary to the traditional publishing model, which puts scientific publications behind a paywall or puts a 6 to 12-month embargo on self-archiving (depositing scholarly research in an online repository or open archive), open access allows for immediate, worldwide access to scientific and scholarly publications.
Big Pharma notched a regrettable victory in the early days of the COVID-19 response when it successfully blocked an enforceable reasonable-pricing clause from inclusion in the first $8.3 billion emergency spending bill. Although the bill contains a provision requiring “fair and reasonable pricing” for federal acquisitions and another authorizing the Secretary of Health and Human Services to take steps to ensure that coronavirus vaccine, treatments, and tests “will be affordable in the domestic market,” those provisions lack any meaningful enforcement mechanism. Moreover, drug companies inserted text that prevents the government from using lack of affordability as a reason to delay development of a medicine... What a difference two weeks have made.
The United States has two viable statutory mechanisms for addressing situations in which patent holders are unable or unwilling to supply sufficient quantities of goods or services to combat the coronavirus crisis: march-in rights under the Bayh-Dole Act and governmental use under 28 U.S.C. § 1498. Though each of these mechanisms presents challenges, these should be surmountable in many cases to ensure that diagnostics, vaccines, therapies and support equipment are produced and distributed rapidly and in sufficient quantities.
[Laura DeNardis and Jennifer Daskal] ... While the online world is often portrayed as a societal ill, this pandemic is a reminder of how much the digital world has to offer. The pandemic also lays bare the many vulnerabilities created by society’s dependence on the internet. These include the dangerous consequences of censorship, the constantly morphing spread of disinformation, supply chain vulnerabilities and the risks of weak cybersecurity.
The world is behind in developing and being able to supply the diagnostics, vaccines, therapeutics, medical devices, and other well adapted medical supplies [medical technologies] needed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic which is sweeping across the globe. Although scientific and medical urgency are building, we need to ensure that the needed medical technologies will be developed and tested urgently, efficiently, and ethically with maximum degrees of open data, open science, and collaboration in the development stage and maximum degrees of universal and equitable access thereafter to all people in all countries. We therefore support the creation of a voluntary emergency Technology Intellectual Property Pool [TIPP] that will accelerate scientific discovery, technology development, proof of safety/efficacy/quality, and broad sharing of the benefits of scientific advancement and its applications in furtherance of the right to health.
[Meredith Jacob, Peter Jaszi, Prue Adler, Michael Carroll, Will Cross, Kristina Ishmael, Pernille Ripp and Carrie Russell] In recent days, as many teachers have faced an abrupt shift to online teaching, there have been questions about how copyright law applies to the translation of classroom-based practices of reading aloud to students to the digital environment. While many well-intentioned commentators have warned teachers against this practice, the fact is that copyright law -- specifically fair use -- permits many read-aloud activities online. As instructors and learners adapt to new educational environments, copyright concerns about reading aloud need not be among the challenges they face.
[Statement signed by over 150 librarians] This Statement is meant to provide clarity for U.S. colleges and universities about how copyright law applies to the many facets of remote teaching and research in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. We write this as copyright specialists at colleges, universities, and other organizations supporting higher education in the U.S. and Canada who work every day with faculty, staff, and librarians to enable them to make ethical and legal choices about copyright issues in online teaching.