Day April 20, 2020

Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Microsoft, and Sandia National Laboratories join “Open COVID Pledge” to make patents freely available in the fight against COVID-19

[Open COVID Pledge Press Release] Amazon, Facebook, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Microsoft, and Sandia National Laboratories announced today that they are joining the Open COVID Pledge by making all of their patents freely available to the public for use in the fight against COVID-19. Together, the group holds hundreds of thousands of patents and is offering to grant a temporary license that enables the public to utilize any of the pledgors’ patents in the research, development, and deployment of medical equipment, network products, software solutions, and other technologies to assist in this urgent public health crisis.

Implementing User Rights for Research in the Field of Artificial Intelligence: A Call for Action at the International Level

[Sean Flynn, Christophe Geiger and João Pedro Quintais] Last year, before the onset of a global pandemic highlighted the critical and urgent need for technology-enabled scientific research, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched an inquiry into issues at the intersection of intellectual property (IP) and artificial intelligence (AI). We and other members of the Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights contributed comments to that inquiry, with a focus on the application of copyright to the use of text and data mining technology. This blog, and the article it is based on, describes some of the most salient points of our submission and concludes by stressing the need for international leadership on this important topic.