[PIJIP] On June 24, Sean Flynn presented "Responding to COVID Through Recognition of the Right to Research in Comparative Copyright" at the 40th annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Teaching and Research in Intellectual Property (ATRIP).
[South Centre] ...The process leading to the Decision confirms the need to fully use the TRIPS flexibilities to address emergency and other situations where public health and other public interests are at stake, and to review the current international IP regime (including article 31bis of the TRIPS Agreement) to accelerate the sharing of technology, including know-how.
[Teresa Hackett] As the world moves from emergency mode to living with COVID, libraries are taking stock of the impact of the global pandemic on library services from a copyright and licensing perspective. Early results indicate that support for online education and access to knowledge fell short of what was needed during the pandemic.
[Yousuf Vawda and Bonginkosi Shozi] The Doha Declaration’s twentieth anniversary in November 2021 has taken place in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The experience of the past two years has demonstrated that the very factors that necessitated the Declaration—the problems of inequitable access to medicines and other health technologies for the world’s poor—continue to plague us.
[International Federation of Library Associations] The report involved a survey of 114 libraries worldwide and 28 interviews during February and March 2022. Respondents were from 29 countries. 83% of responding library professionals said they had copyright-related challenges providing materials during pandemic-related facility closures. These intersected with ongoing challenges predating the pandemic, including budget pressures, external financial crises, difficult negotiations with publishers, and demand for eBooks that outpaces publisher offerings.
[Muhammad Zaheer Abbas] Abstract: The current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the significance of the export-oriented compulsory licensing mechanism for countries lacking domestic manufacturing capacity. Article 31bis, the first amendment to the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), is aimed at giving effect to the WTO General Council Decision 2003, which waived the domestic market requirement of compulsory licensing. In 2005, Canada became the first country to amend its patent laws to provide for Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) as enabling legislation to implement the WTO General Council Decision 2003. Canada clearly described its regime as a humanitarian initiative aimed at helping developing countries that lack sufficient drug and/or vaccine manufacturing capacity of their own and rely upon imports to address their public health problems. The legislation was compromised, however, by the conflicting desire to protect the corporate interests of patent-holding corporations.
[Brook Baker] Twenty months ago, India and South Africa proposed a comprehensive but temporary waiver of enforcement of WTO intellectual property monopolies on COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, diagnostics, and other medical supplies that would have triggered a faster, more affordable, and more equitable COVID response. Rather than respond with alacrity and solidarity, the rich countries of the world, acting on behalf of Big Pharma, united with delay, distortion, and disinformation. The result is an illusory, do-nothing text, cobbled together by the WTO Secretariat, that the U.S., European Commission, Germany, Switzerland, and the U.K. are trying to cram down the neck of developing countries already choking on a steady diet of broken promises and immeasurable death, suffering, and economic disruption.
[Fernando dos Santos, Caroline B. Ncube, and Marisella Ouma] Abstract: We debate whether intellectual property (IP) protection of medical products and devices required to prevent, treat and contain COVID-19 should be waived, as proposed by South Africa and India, under the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s Agreement on Trade-related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement). We discuss existing public policy mechanisms under the TRIPS Agreement and how these have been implemented at national level in Africa, and find that these have proven inadequate and that they have been sub-optimally implemented. We then consider the TRIPS Waiver proposal which has been tabled due to the inadequacy of existing mechanisms and outline the EU’s counter proposal which is founded on existing mechanisms.
[Carlos M. Correa and Juan I. Correa] The paper discusses the flexibilization of the sui generis system of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) under European law recently introduced to allow for the manufacturing, stockpiling and export of covered products. Against this background, it examines the viability under the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement) of an exception allowing for the manufacture and export of patent-protected products. It concludes that such an exception would promote competition and enhance access to medicines (including biologicals) for the general public while being consistent with Article 30 of the TRIPS Agreement if read in accordance with the principles of interpretation of customary international law.
[Muhammad Zaheer Abbas] Abstract: The current COVID-19 pandemic has put the problem of equitable access to health technologies in the limelight because governments across the globe are struggling to meet the health needs of their populations. Patent exclusivities add to the cost of healthcare by allowing supra-competitive prices of protected technologies. There is a pressing need to mobilize all means and resources to promote price-reducing generic competition. Civil society organizations can make an enormous difference by successfully opposing questionable patents. Patent opposition is an administrative safeguard which procedurally enables community organizations to play this crucial role as defenders of the public interest. This paper supports the adoption of the patent opposition procedural safeguard as it provides civil society organizations with an affordable and practically feasible mechanism to challenge validity of questionable patents.
[Anubha Sinha] Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m speaking on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society, India. The Proposal by the African Group for a Draft work program on Exceptions and Limitations has the potential to address issues faced in the domains of access to information, culture and education, keeping in mind that there have been systemic shifts in the knowledge ecosystem since pandemic, which will endure in the long term as well.
[Ximena Benavides] Abstract: ...This Article analyzes the power dynamics of vaccine manufacturing and distribution of U.S. pharmaceutical companies in the context of global COVID 19 vaccination. Drawing on the health-justice and law-and-political-economy scholarship of the last decade, this Article demonstrates how a “patent culture” shaped by intellectual property law fundamentally neglects health-equity principles as it politicizes healthcare access. These contemporary frameworks suggest that the global COVID-19 vaccine-access problem is the result of avoidable policy choices of big manufacturers and affluent governments. Despite a long history of inequities in access to healthcare, policy choices—as predicted by Hart’s inverse equity theory—have favored a purposely inequitable-by-design vaccination program driven by the wealth and power of those allowed to control vaccine production and supply globally.