The Chilling Effect: Investor-State Dispute Settlement, Graphic Health Warnings, the Plain Packaging of Tobacco Products, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership Victoria University Law and Justice Journal (2017) Matthew Rimmer Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) poses significant challenges in respect of tobacco control,…
[Authors Alliance] The Parliament of the Republic of South Africa is currently considering the Copyright Amendment Bill, an update of the country’s 1978 copyright legislation. The proposed bill includes a provision for termination of transfers. Today, we submitted a letter to South Africa’s Members of Parliament in support of a carefully drafted termination provision that would allow authors to regain rights that they previously signed away.
[Fix the Patent Laws Coalition, Link] The Fix the Patent Laws Coalition (FTPL) welcomes the news today that the Cabinet of the Government of South Africa has approved the new Intellectual Property (IP) Policy. After nine years of policy development, two different draft policies and various rounds of public consultation, we now finally have an agreed-upon government policy that can guide much-needed law reform. Though we await seeing the final policy until it is gazetted by government, we are optimistic that the policy will herald a new era for access to medicines in South Africa by prioritising people’ lives over the profits of pharmaceutical corporations.
[Tusi Fokane and Ben Cashdan] A new organization of South African creators has formed to press their views in favor of balanced copyright provisions in the ongoing amendment process. ReCreateZA (www.re-createza.org) represents a broad coalition of creatives, including “writers, filmmakers, photographers, educational content producers, software and video game developers, technology entrepreneurs, artists, poets, producers of accessible format materials and other South African creators.”
[Iniciativa Educação Aberta] The Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) published an ordinance on the 16th of may, that determines that any educational resources paid for by the Ministry, which is to be used for basic education (K-12) should be open educational resources, giving permissions for anyone to “access, use, adapt and distribute at no cost”. It further emphasises the importance of open formats and standards whenever technically viable.
April 27, 2018: Digital rights organisations in Mexico are sounding the alarm after the Senate approved changes to the copyright law that would censor information online. The measures would allow for the preemptive removal of content without having to prove that a copyright infringement has actually taken place. Yesterday the Senate approved the modifications to the Federal Copyright Law, with 63 votes in favor, 11 against, and 23 abstentions. The Senate voted with little internal discussion, and without the knowledge of or input from civil society organisations or the public.
The accessibsa project (accessibsa.org) has a new report out. Authored by Jonathan Berger and Andrew Rens, the report is titled - Innovation & Intellectual Property in South Africa: The Case for Reform. Jonathan and Andrew examined every patent granted in South Africa between 2005-2015, i.e. over a period of 10 years. Their central questions are whether the current IP regime in SA favours innovation as measured by patents, what the state of innovation as measured by patents in SA is, how it ties into the broader legal framework that governs patents, and how all of this related to the proposed IP reform process underway in SA.
On May 8, Professor Sean Flynn will release the latest PIJIP report - The User Rights Database: Measuring the Impact of Copyright Balance at a public lecture at University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The report is being released as the South Africa Parliament deliberates on a copyright amendment bill that includes a proposal to adopt a new open and flexible general exception modeled on the US fair use clause.
The QUT Law Review has officially published the final version of Volume 17 (2) – Special Issue on the Plain Packaging of Tobacco Products. This issue looks at important legal and regulatory issues surrounding plain packaging reforms and the ways in which other jurisdictions have approached plain packaging reform and policy. In particular, it covers Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Ireland.
[Feroz Ali, Sudarsan Rajagopal, Venkata S. Raman & Roshan John] This report identifies pharmaceutical drug patents granted in likely contravention of anti-evergreening provisions under section 3 of the Indian Patents Act, from a cohort of 2293 patents granted between 2009 and 2016. An estimate of the rate at which the Indian Patent Office (IPO) erroneously grants such patents, as well as the rationale for grants were arrived at by analysing the prosecution history of some grants and the claim language of all granted patents.
In the latest report from the South Africa copyright amendment bill process (see below), the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee suggested that it may be taking its fair use proposal off the table... notes from the most recent committee meeting conclude that the copyright exception provisions in the bill might be limited to “address the issues of hearing-impaired people, librarians and museum staff, and the Department of Trade and Industry would select a third issue, but one that was not contentious so that the legislation could be fast-tracked.”
[Sign-on letter from 169 European Scholars] We, the undersigned 169 scholars (of whom 100 are full professors) working in the fields of intellectual property, internet law, human rights law and journalism studies at universities all over Europe write to oppose the proposed press publishers’ right. Article 11 of the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, as it currently stands following negotiations in the EU Council and Parliament, is a bad piece of legislation.