infoJustice

A Week of Events on Copyright and Access to Knowledge in South Africa

[PIJIP] A coalition of academic and civil society organizations are co-organizing a week of debates on copyright and access to knowledge in South Africa, beginning on January 23rd. The organizers for these events are American University's PIJIP, the University of Pretoria's Future Africa, the University of Cape Town IP Unit, the Strathmore University Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, the South Centre, Electronic Information for Libraries, Masakhane and the Wikimedia Foundation.

PIJIP

January 9, 2023

South Centre Statement on the extension of the TRIPS waiver for diagnostics and therapeutics for COVID-19

[South Centre] Developing countries should consider options that can be implemented now to deal with IP barriers to expand production and access to COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics, while the so far elusive decision on whether to extend a TRIPS waiver to cover these products is taken by WTO.

Mechanical Licenses for Video Games

[Lukas Ruthes Gonçalves] Abstract: Mechanical licenses are a scheme used in the music industry to not only allow publishers and songwriters to be compensated for their work, but also to allow this important cultural product to be better distributed in society and not get lost in time. Video games have accrued great importance culturally, but are at an increasingly greater risk of vanishing, due to being locked into a certain hardware. Allowing fans and other creators to utilize mechanical licenses to remake their favorite video games would help preservation efforts and serve as a reliable income stream for its original publisher.

Papers

January 9, 2023