IP-Watch Monthly People News

By Tove Iren S. Gerhardsen
Marta Gabrieloni, who for the past eight years has worked on intellectual property rights issues at the mission of Argentina, focusing on WIPO and the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), will leave at the end of November to return to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Buenos Aires. She will, for the time being, be replaced by Inés Fastame. Gabrieloni has been instrumental in the debate on a development agenda at WIPO as Argentina is one of the leaders in the Friends of Development group.

The first secretary of the South Korean mission in charge of intellectual property and WIPO, Joo-ik Park, is leaving Geneva in mid-February 2007. His next assignment with the Korean Intellectual Property Office has not yet been fixed, he said, nor has it been decided who will replace him at the mission.

The Norwegian mission in Geneva has appointed Cecilie Kverme to be in charge of TRIPS issues, and Gry Karen Waage, who will focus on UN-related intellectual property rights issues.

Cecilia Oh, who has worked on trade and intellectual property right issues at the World Health Organization for the past three years, has left the WHO to take up a position as trade policy advisor with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. “I am looking forward to working on the broader trade and development issues,” Oh told Intellectual Property Watch, something she had done prior to joining the WHO as a senior researcher with the non-governmental organisation, Third World Network. “I am also looking forward to continue working on IP issues and to follow the developments in WHO, particularly with regard to the deliberations of the Intergovernmental Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health,” she said. “When I applied for the UNDP position last year, I had not thought that IP issues would rise so quickly to the top of the WHO’s agenda.” Oh co-authored the study, “The use of flexibilities in TRIPS by developing countries: Can they promote access to medicines?” This report was commissioned by the WHO Commission on Intellectual Property Rights, Innovation and Public Health, and was published online a year ago but came out in book form this year. The report attracted controversy when a senior US health official urged the WHO to withdraw the book, on the basis of WHO’s lack of competence to deal with the trade issues addressed in the report (IPW Monthly Reporter, Vol. 3, No. 10).

Madeleine Eriksson has taken up a position as policy analyst at the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) in Geneva. Eriksson previously worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm, where at the trade department she was responsible for the TRIPS agreement and competition issues, with a second responsibility for bilateral investment agreements. Eriksson holds a law degree (a “LLM”) from Uppsala University, Sweden where she focused on intellectual property rights. At the IFPMA, she will work closely with Eric Noehrenberg on intellectual property rights issues.

Florian Müller, long-time activist on free software issues in Europe, has withdrawn from the political debate on the European Patent Litigation Agreement. Müller said he will neither lobby nor make any further public statements on the EPLA because; “it is too difficult to get such efforts supported by the narrow-minded, short-sighted people who tend to run medium-sized IT companies. Instead of dealing with the patent threat at the political level, most of them prefer to wait until the trolls feast on them.” Müller said he may turn to what he did before he got involved in IP policy, when he was “a non-political programmer working on a computer game.” But there may be some IP involvement as well: “The EU is looking at legislation and regulation concerning professional football, and the rules for selling broadcasting rights are obviously a key issue,” he said.

Regine Qualmann has been appointed head of the trade programme at the German non-governmental organisation, GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit), which focuses on sustainable development.

Karsten Gerloff has taken up a position as researcher at the UNUMERIT, a research institute run jointly by the United Nations University and the economics faculty of the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands. “Besides studying free software issues, part of my work consists of making MERIT an active participant in the Access to Knowledge discussions. The institute focuses on the question of how science, technology and innovation bring about development and social change,” Gerloff said.

Andres Lamoliatte has been appointed second secretary at the Chilean mission, in charge of WTO issues. Lamoliatte will not work directly on intellectual property, but is interested in the issue as he has worked on the bilateral free trade agreement with the United States, for example. He replaces Louis Petit who has left for Washington.

Sherwin Siy has been appointed staff attorney at the Washington, DC-based advocacy group Public Knowledge (PK), which works on defending rights in the emerging digital culture. Before joining PK, Siy spent a year as staff counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. In this newly created position, Siy will head up the Global Knowledge Initiative. “I’m therefore going to focus on international IP issues, such as the upcoming discussions on the WIPO broadcast treaty,” he said. Siy graduated from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2005.

Margaret Chan of Hong Kong (pictured) was chosen as the new director general of the WHO, among the five candidates that made it to the short list in November, replacing the late Lee Jong-wook, who passed away in May this year. Anders Nordström has served as deputy director general since May. [See story on www.ip-watch.org, 8 November 2006]

Development and Internet governance issues got a boost at the United Nations International Telecommunication Union as members elected Hamadoun Touré of Mali to be the next Secretary-General. Touré has been director of the ITU Telecommunications Development Bureau since 1999. [See story on www.ip-watch.org, 10 November 2006]

Tove Iren S. Gerhardsen may be reached at tgerhardsen@ip-watch.ch