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Hundreds of Prominent US Civil Society Organizations Call on Pres. Biden to Stop Blocking COVID-19 WTO Waiver to Boost Vaccines, Treatments Worldwide

[Public Citizen] Today, U.S. consumer, faith, health, labor, human rights, development and other civil society groups urged the White House to support an emergency COVID-19 waiver of World Trade Organization (WTO) intellectual property rules, so that greater supplies of vaccines, treatments, and diagnostic tests can be produced in as many places as possible as quickly as possible. The pandemic cannot be stopped anywhere unless vaccines, tests, and treatments are available everywhere, so variants that evade current vaccines do not develop. At a press conference joined by Reps. Rosa DeLauro, (D-Conn.), Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), U.S. civil society leaders released a letter signed by hundreds of prominent U.S. organizations calling on the Biden administration to join more than 100 nations in support of the waiver. The Trump administration led a handful of countries opposed to the waiver at the WTO. At two recent WTO committee meetings, the new administration has not reversed the Trump era obstruction of the waiver.

Fair Use Jurisprudence 2019–2021

[Jack Lerner, Luke Hartman, and Jordin Wilcher] We are excited to celebrate Fair Use Week with a new report from the UC Irvine School of Law’s Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology (IPAT) Clinic: Fair Use Jurisprudence 2019–2021: A Comprehensive Review... At the UCI Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic, we work with independent filmmakers to make sure that when they do need to make fair use, they can do so responsibly, appropriately, and safely. Over the past couple of years, our Filmmaker Counseling team began to hear of a rising number of fair use opinions coming out of the federal courts, and we decided to embark on an exhaustive study of recent fair use decisions in copyright infringement cases. In total, we identified and analyzed seventy-two opinions issued by federal courts and made available on Westlaw or Lexis between January 1, 2019, and February 25, 2021. In our report, we provide abstracts of 72 opinions along with some commentary on selected cases.