[ReCreate South Africa] ReCreate South Africa (“ReCreate”) is a non-profit association, established in 2018 to advocate for a balanced Copyright Act that includes modern creators’ rights. ReCreate is a coalition of writers, filmmakers, photographers, educational content producers, software and video game developers, technology entrepreneurs, artists, poets, producers of accessible format materials, freedom of expression advocates, and other South African creators... ReCreate South Africa welcomes the Copyright Amendment Bill’s clear guidelines and balance between the rights of creators and users. We applaud the promotion of three key rights to enable us to create the next generation of South African content for the world: The Right to Create ... 2. the right to Own ... 3. The Right to Earn.

Last week, the Indian government released its second Draft National e-Commerce Policy, which is open for stakeholder comments. The document outlines anti-counterfeiting measures which would oblige platforms to work with trademark owners to ensure the authenticity of items sold. In…

[MSF Press Release] Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is supporting a patent challenge filed in India this week by two tuberculosis survivors, to prevent pharmaceutical corporation Johnson & Johnson (J&J) from extending its monopoly on the tuberculosis drug bedaquiline. Nandita Venkatesan from Mumbai, India and Phumeza Tisile from Khayelitsha, South Africa, who filed the patent challenge at the Mumbai Patent Office, both survived drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) but lost their hearing because of the toxicity of the treatment. They are now fighting to ensure that newer drugs like bedaquiline – which are safer and more effective – are made affordable and accessible to everybody with DR-TB, to replace painful and toxic drugs that need to be injected.

[International Federation of Library Associations] Following a call for comments by the government of New Zealand Te Aotearoa on draft legislation designed to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, IFLA has made a submission. This highlights the need to reject provisions that go beyond what the Treaty requires, and to respect the fundamental principle of non-discrimination.

[Daniel P. Gross] This paper studies the effects of the USPTO's patent secrecy program in World War II, under which approximately 11,200 U.S. patent applications were issued secrecy orders which halted examination and prohibited inventors from disclosing their inventions or filing in foreign countries in the interests of national security. Secrecy orders were issued most heavily in areas important to the war effort – including radar, electronics, and synthetic materials – and nearly all rescinded en masse at the end of the war.

[Teresa Nobre] In the age of connectivity, it is not enough to fight for better copyright laws for users in certain regions of the world. We need to advocate for baseline international standards that allow cross-border uses of copyrighted materials, for purposes such as access to knowledge and education, in each and every country of the world. That is why public interest advocates, Communia included, keep investing their energies in the international discussions on copyright exceptions, using their capacities of permanent observers of the WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR).

Singapore recently released its long awaited report on copyright reform. As expected, the report proposes to eliminate the fifth factor of its fair use test – which requires examination of whether a license is available for the activity in question. The proposed reforms go much further, echoing many of the policies and approaches of South Africa’s Copyright Amendment Bill in focusing on the rights of individual creators at the center of the reform.

[David Branigan] Open access advocates in the United States are celebrating the expiration, and non-renewal, of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which introduces into the public domain all works from 1923, and signals an end of the practice by US lawmakers to continually extend the terms of copyright protection. Leading figures from groups such as Creative Commons and Wikimedia Foundation gathered to discuss why this shift in policy took place, and what it means for the public domain. They asserted that this change is the result of a general acceptance of the value of “the commons,” brought on in part by the era of the internet.

[Ralph D. Clifford] In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I wrote two articles on the consequences of using computer-based creativity to create works later claimed for copyright or patent protection... The basic conclusion of these articles was that substituting artificial intelligence technology [“A.I.”] for human creativity results in works that are in the public domain. This essay... reexamines the area after a gap of almost fifteen years.

[SPARC] President Trump today signed into law the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act, a sweeping, government-wide mandate requiring U.S. federal agencies to publish all non-sensitive government information – including federally-funded research – as open data.