Day April 11, 2018

MSF: Open Letter to European Commissioner on EU India Free Trade Agreement and Its Impact on Access to Medicines

[Els Torreele] On behalf of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), an international medical humanitarian organisation that provides emergency medical assistance to populations in distress in more than 70 countries, I am writing to express our position on the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations between India and the European Union (EU). I understand that both parties have agreed to resume technical discussions concerning the FTA, including the chapter on intellectual property (IP) provisions. India has for many years played a pivotal role in providing a sustainable supply of quality assured generic medicines that are vitally important for public health systems around the world. It is critical that the EU-India FTA agreement remain free of TRIPS-plus measures and heavy-handed enforcement provisions that could jeopardize access to, and production of, affordable generic medicines.

The Exception for Text and Data Mining (TDM) in the Proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market – Legal Aspects

[Christophe Geiger, Giancarlo Frosio and Oleksandr Bulayenko] This research paper reproduces the study commissioned to CEIPI by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI-Committee). It provides an analysis of the European Commission’s Proposal to introduce in Article 3 a mandatory exception to copyright allowing to carrying out text and data mining of protected works, assesses its positive and negative impacts and provides some suggestions for possible improvements. Advantages of introducing an “open clause” in EU copyright law on top of an enumerated list of limitations and exceptions to address some of the related problems are also reviewed.