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

Lessons From India’s Implementation of Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health

[Nanditta Batra] Abstract: ... Notwithstanding the effect of patents on access to medicines, Article 27 of the TRIPS Agreement ordained patents for inventions “in all fields of technology”. While the genie was out of the bottle in the form of patents for pharmaceuticals, the developing countries were able to extract some procedural and substantive flexibilities like transition period, parallel importation
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Reforming Copyright or Toward Another Science? A More Human Rights-Oriented Approach Under the REBSPA in Constructing a “Right to Research” for Scholarly Publishing

[Klaus Beiter] Abstract: This article identifies copyright impediments existing in the sphere of science, to then make (tentative) suggestions as to how these may be overcome. It focuses on scholarly publishing only, and here primarily on digital content, specifically asking whether expensive commercial scholarly publishers continue to “add value” to research in the digital era. The deficits of copyright law
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From Patents to Secrets

[Michael Risch] Abstract: Beginning in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the type of inventions that were patentable. In the aftermath of these limits, patent plaintiffs began to lose cases—especially software patent cases—in a way they had not before. Commentators predicted that, faced with waning patent protection, inventors would look to trade secrecy to protect their creations. This chapter is
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A Look At Copyright Exceptions for Research and Data from the Global Innovation Index

This post describes the newly released Global Innovation Index and PIJIP's ongoing research into copyright exceptions for research. It then presents correlations between subsets of the Global Innovation Index data and PIJIP's categorization of copyright laws.
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Zooming in on Education: An Empirical Study on Digital Platforms and Copyright in the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands

[Bernd Justin Jütte, Guido Noto La Diega, Giulia Priora, Guido Salza] Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant change in the types of teaching infrastructure used in higher education. This article examines how the use of commercial digital platforms for educational purposes impacted on teaching practices. At the same time, it shines a light on the experiences and
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South African Constitutional Court Rectifies Copyright Discrimination for People with Disabilities

[Sanya Samtani] In a unanimous judgment, the Constitutional Court of South Africa confirmed the Pretoria High Court’s finding that the Copyright Act 1978 is unconstitutional and unfairly discriminatory to the extent that it fails to provide for for people with visual and print disabilities. This vindicates a decades-long struggle by BlindSA, the applicants, represented by SECTION27. It is also the
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