Category US Domestic Policies

Rising Middle-IP Powers Dissolving the North/South Polarisation in the International IP System

[Ruth Knoblich and Tobias Schonwetter] Academia and the public have long been focusing on the North/South power asymmetries in the international IP regime. Two decades after the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) came into effect at the beginning of 1995, it is now becoming obvious, however, that rising economies such as Brazil, India, China and South Africa emerge as a cross-cutting group of players that may help, going forward, to dissolve the North/South polarisation in the international IP order. Firstly, these countries make full use of the existing international IP system: They design their national IP law in compliance with the TRIPS minimum standards for protection, while counterbalancing these standards by strategically utilising (and testing the boundaries of) the TRIPS flexibilities available to them. Secondly, emerging economies have also begun to successfully influence the international system of IP law and policy-making itself to better reflect their interests and needs.

My CRTC Submission on the Bell Coalition Site Blocking Plan: Why it is Disproportionate, Harmful, and Inconsistent With Global Standards

The CRTC’s deadline for submissions on the Bell coalition website blocking plan closed last week, with more than 10,000 people and organizations filing directly with the CRTC. The interventions including a warning from the U.N. Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression that the blocking plan “raises serious inconsistencies” with Canada’s human rights obligations, fears from ISPs that the plan will increase Internet costs for consumers, expert analysis on the technical risks of site blocking, and detailed reviews of the many problems with the plan. My submission has not yet been posted online, but is available in full here.

This Is Not How You Make Copyright Reform! Report from the Copyright Action Days

[Communia Association] Last week more than a hundred of copyright reform activists got together in Brussels for the the European Copyright Action Days to make it clear to EU lawmakers that the copyright reform effort that is currently being discussed in the European Parliament and the European Council is not good enough. In a series of events organized by Copyright 4 Creativity, Create.Refresh, Communia and others, activists and other stakeholders discussed the shortcomings of the current reform proposal as well as ideas for a more future-proof overhaul of the outdated EU copyright system.

Project Gutenberg Blocks Access In Germany To All Its Public Domain Books Because Of Local Copyright Claim On 18 Of Them

[Glyn Moody] Project Gutenberg, which currently offers 56,000 free ebooks, is one of the treasures of the Internet, but it is not as well known as it should be. Started in 1991 by Michael S. Hart, who sadly died in 2011, Project Gutenberg is dedicated to making public domain texts widely available. Over the last 25 years, volunteers have painstakingly entered the text of books that are out of copyright, and released them in a variety of formats.

Intellectual Property Use in Middle Income Countries: The Case of Chile

Authors: Carsten Fink, Bronwyn Hall and Christian Helmers. Abstract: We analyze the use of intellectual property (IP) by firms in Chile over the decade 1995-2005 as the then middle-income country experienced rapid economic growth of 4.7 percent per year. We use a novel dataset that contains a combination of detailed firm-level information from the annual manufacturing census, information on firms’ innovative activities from Chile’s innovation surveys, and firms’ patent, industrial design, and trademark filings with the Chilean IP office.

Debunking the Fair Use vs. Fair Dealing Myth: Have We Had Fair Use All Along?

[Ariel Katz] According to conventional wisdom, a fundamental difference exists between the American fair use doctrine and the Canadian (or Commonwealth) fair dealing doctrine: while American fair use can apply potentially to any purpose, Canadian fair dealing could only apply to those purposes enumerated in the statute. Accordingly, fair dealing cannot apply to dealings for other purposes even if they would otherwise be fair. This conventional wisdom is false.

Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement

[Daniel Nazer] Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.

How Copyright Law Is Holding Back Australian Creators

[Kylie Pappalardo and Karnika Bansal] Australian creators struggle to understand copyright law and how to manage it for their own projects. Indeed, a new study has found copyright law can act as a deterrent to creation, rather than an incentive for it. Interviews with 29 Australian creators, including documentary filmmakers, writers, musicians and visual artists, sought to understand how they reuse existing content to create. It considered issues such as whether permission (“licences”) had been sought to reuse copyrighted content; the amount of time and cost involved in obtaining such permissions; and a creator’s recourse if permission was either denied or too expensive to obtain.

Captured Copyright Law

A new book by Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, The Captured Economy, contains important insights on how the U.S. copyright system impedes economic growth and promotes income inequality in America. Lindsey, vice president of the Niskanen Center, describes himself as a libertarian. Teles, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, describes himself as a liberal. Their basic thesis is that powerful corporations and professionals use government regulation to eliminate competition and increase their wealth, thereby promoting inequality and slowing economic growth. Intellectual property law is one of their case studies.

IP Unit Submits Its Comments Concerning the DTI’s Draft IP Policy, Phase One

[et_pb_section bb_built=”1″][et_pb_row][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text _builder_version=”3.0.90″ background_layout=”light” max_width=”90%”] [University of Cape Town IP Unit, Link] On 17 November 2017, the IP Unit submitted to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) its full set of comments on the Draft Intellectual Property Policy of the Republic…

Patients and Parliamentarians ask Chilean President Michelle Bachelet to Support a Petition for Compulsory Licenses for Patents Related to Hepatitis C and Cancer Drugs

Representatives of Corporacion Innovarte, Patient Foundation Nuevo Renacer, Pharmaceutical Chemists Guild, and cancer and hepatitis patients attended the Presidential Palace “La Moneda” on November 10th to deliver a letter to the Chilean President of the Republic, Michelle Bachelet, asking her to instruct…