Advocating for a world where intellectual
property law serves the public interest.

WIPO Elections: Member States Get Ready to Settle on a New Director General

[Juan Ramón Rangel Silva] As the sun sets on the second term of Australia’s Francis Gurry, WIPO’s 83-member Coordination Committee will elect the organization’s next Director General in less than a week. This is a hotly contested and high stakes election that initially began with 10 candidates. At the present time, only 6 candidates remain in the running. Based on
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Are Contracts Enough? An Empirical Study of Author Rights in Australian Publishing Agreements

[Joshua Yuvaraj and Rebecca Giblin] Abstract: A majority of the world’s nations grant authors statutory reversion rights: entitlements to reclaim their copyrights in certain circumstances, such as their works becoming unavailable for purchase. In Australia (as in the UK) we have no such universal protections, leaving creator rights to be governed entirely by their contracts with investors. But is this
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Access to Medicines Activism: Collaboration, Conflicts, and Complementarities

Abstract: This chapter address three phases of access to medicines [A2M] advocacy. The first phase started in the late 1990s and continuing into at least the mid 2000s when global cooperation and collaboration between A2M advocates grew as they confronted the terrible scourge of HIV compounded by the refusal of pharmaceutical companies and rich country governments to take measures to
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Call for Proposals Open for the 2020 Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest

We in Colombia are looking forward to welcoming you to Cartagena for the 6th Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest, August 13-15. From this week on the registry and call for session proposals is open! It includes the request for scholarships. We will have three main tracks on Medicines, Digital Rights, and Copyright Reforms and Open Policies. We
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Does Copyright Require Authorization to Use Data “Subsisting in Copyright Works?”

The World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva has requested comments on a series of questions about whether “use of the data subsisting in copyright works without authorization for machine learning constitute an infringement of copyright?” I have joined other copyright experts in a submission to WIPO commenting on their questions. This note explains in more detail some of my reservations
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Reconstructing Rights: Project Synthesis and Recommendations

[P. Bernt Hugenholtz and Martin Kretschmer] Abstract: ... This introductory chapter gives an overview of a collaborative research project (‘Reconstructing Rights’) that normatively examined the core economic rights protected under EU copyright law, with the aim of realigning these rights with economic and technological realities. Five ‘borderline’ cases are being examined to explore the implications of different theoretical models: (1)
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