[Anna S.Y. Wong, Clarke B. Cole, and Jillian C. Kohler] This paper evaluates the three primary barriers to employing compulsory licenses for pharmaceuticals underscored by members during TRIPS waiver discussions at the WTO: (1) a lack of enabling domestic legislation, (2) a lack of domestic manufacturing capacity coupled with an unworkable Article 31bis importation system, and (3) consistent political pressure from other members to refrain from issuing compulsory licenses.

[Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge (I-MAK)] The patent system is not working as intended and the public is paying the price. Astronomical prescription drug costs are straining the healthcare system and the budgets of American families and employers. Prescription drug spending has increased 60% in the last decade to over $400 billion today. The status quo is unsustainable.

[Teresa Hackett] EIFL supports the proposal at the WTO by South Africa and India, backed by more than 100 countries, to temporarily waive IP rights on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments... From a copyright and research perspective, there are three key components for the prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19. First, researchers must be allowed to do the research. Second, researchers (and people) must be allowed to read the research. Third, libraries (and archives) must be allowed to save the research for future use. But these activities are not universally permitted. The proposed TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights ) waiver would help ensure that scientists and researchers, no matter where they are, can undertake work on COVID-19 without legal barriers or roadblocks.

[Letter endorsed by 12 civil society groups] The Administration has displayed great leadership by announcing support for a TRIPs waiver and attempting to fashion an approach agreeable to all parties. As it continues these efforts, it should resist the temptation to narrow the scope of the waiver to exclude copyrights and other rights. Ambassador Tai’s May 5 announcement expressed support for waiving “intellectual property protections,” not just patent protections. We urge the Administration to remain steadfast in its advocacy for including all forms of intellectual property within the scope of the waiver.

[Vitor Henrique Pinto Ido] This paper provides a broad overview of the RCEP agreement and discusses the details of the intellectual property (IP) Chapter. Significantly, it does not contain substantive TRIPS-plus provisions that undermine public health in developing countries—although it does contain such provisions in other areas such as copyrights, trademarks, and IP enforcement.

[Communia Association] On the 26th of January at 1530 (CET) we are hosting the first COMMUNIA salon of 2021. This edition will focus on the most controversial question of the discussions surrounding the implementation of Article 17: the need to introduce ex-ante user rights safeguards in national implementations of the directive, to ensure that legitimate uses of third party works cannot be automatically blocked.

[Balázs Bodó, Dániel Antal, and Zoltán Puha] Abstract: Library Genesis is one of the oldest and largest illegal scholarly book collections online. Without the authorization of copyright holders, this shadow library hosts and makes more than 2 million scholarly publications, monographs, and textbooks available. This paper analyzes a set of weblogs of one of the Library Genesis mirrors, provided to us by one of the service’s administrators. We reconstruct the social and economic factors that drive the global and European demand for illicit scholarly literature. In particular, we test if lower income regions can compensate for the shortcomings in legal access infrastructures by more intensive use of illicit open resources.