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

The Effect of Patent Disclosure Quality on Innovation

[Travis Dyer, Stephen Glaeser, Mark H. Lang and Caroline Sprecher] Abstract: The patent system grants inventors temporary monopoly rights in exchange for a public disclosure detailing their innovation. These disclosures are meant to allow others to recreate and build on the patented innovation. We examine how the quality of these disclosures affects follow-on innovation. We use the plausibly exogenous assignment
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Defending Access to Medicines in Regional Trade Agreements: Lessons From the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership – A Qualitative Study of Policy Actors’ Views

[Belinda Townsend] ...The RCEP negotiations were initially framed as focused on the needs of low income countries. Public health concerns emerged however when draft negotiating chapters were leaked online, revealing pressures on countries to agree to intellectual property and investment measures that could exacerbate issues of access to medicines and seeds, and protecting regulatory space for public health. A concerted
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Notes from the WIPO Standing Committee on COpyright and Related Rights

[Anubha Sinha] Day 1 - Member states delivered opening statements and deliberated on the progress, substantive provisions, and method of work on the draft broadcasting treaty text. This blog post summarises positions and contentions that supported: 1) transparency in SCCR work 2) limitations and exceptions 3) addressing the object of protection and overbroad scope of rights in the draft treaty
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WIPO Agrees to Hold Information Session on COVID

[Electronic Information for Libraries] WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/41) has just held its first - and only - meeting in 2021. EIFL was represented by Teresa Hackett, EIFL Copyright and Libraries Programme Manager, Dick Kawooya, University of South Carolina, and EIFL Copyright Coordinator in Senegal, Awa Cissé, Universite Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD), Dakar...EIFL called for action
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Academic Open Letter in Support of the TRIPS Intellectual Property Waiver Proposal

[Letter endorsed by 124 Academics] The temporary TRIPS waiver - as proposed by India and South Africa and supported by more than 100 countries - is a necessary and proportionate legal measure towards the clearing of existing intellectual property barriers to scaling up of production of COVID-19 health technologies in a direct, consistent and effective fashion. We call on the
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Submission to South African Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry – RE: Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B – 2017]

[Global Expert Network on Copyright User Rights] We provide this comment on Clause 13, section 12A of the Copyright Amendment Bill [B13B-2017]. Section 12A is an open general exception for “fair use” of copyrighted works. This provision is largely an updating of South Africa’s current general exception for “fair dealing” with a copyrighted work. The primary improvements of Section 12A
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