U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk testified before the Senate Finance Committee today about the Obama Administration’s 2012 Trade Agenda. (Last week, USTR released its Annual Report outlining the 2012 Agenda in detail.) The Committee has a webcast available here, and…
On Sunday 4 March, I attended the stakeholders’ forum at the 11th round of the Trans-Pacific Negotiations in Melbourne. I am particularly interested in the intellectual property chapter given my involvement in landmark copyright litigation in Australia. The leaked US…
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. Negotiations of the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) have turned to discussions of the pharmaceutical reimbursement chapter today. This issue is highly controversial and represents a very recent shift in trade policy. There are only two previous free trade…
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. At this week’s Melbourne round of TPP negotiations, the Computers and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) — representing tech companies like Google, Facebook, E-Bay and Yahoo — has been circulating a new proposal for adding copyright limitations and exceptions…
[Enclosed are my comments at the TPP stakeholder forum in Melbourne, Australia, March 4, 2012. You may also see my Presentation Slides: What ACTA should learn from TPP and listen via Audio File TPP Presentation March 4 2012] I want…
On Friday March 2 (Australian time), the Australian Digital Alliance, NZRise, Knowledge Ecology International, Computer & Communications Industry Association, Internet NZ and New Zealand Computer Society hosted a briefing for negotiators on the TPP IP chapter and internet policy. These…
[Originally posted on publicknowledge.org] In my previous post on the Transpacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), I explained how provisions of TPP might harm you. Of course, it’s hard to know exactly what might be bad within secret agreements like the TPP–all…
PIJIP Research Paper no. 2012-06 Author: Jonathan Band Abstract: The controversy in the United States over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) has profound implications for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. The SOPA debate underscores the importance of striking the…
PIJIP Research Paper no. 2012-05 Author: Margot Kaminski Abstract: In the past several years of free trade agreement negotiations, a number of proposals for establishing an international standard of liability for copyright infringement by online intermediaries have emerged. These proposals…
Dissatisfied with the exclusive right to set the price at which copies of their works are first sold, copyright holders have been trying, for over 150 years, to bolster the resale prices at which copies of their works are re-sold,…
There is a danger that, in Canada’s quest to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), Canada may cede whatever leadership it has gained in the field of progressive copyright provisions. Canada’s Bill C-11, the proposed “Copyright Modernization Act”, includes provisions…
Public interest advocates and analysts have long been critical of the “maximalist” intellectual property agenda of some wealthy countries. But there is also a counter-current in the public interest community that is advocating for new positive norms to promote precisely…