Get Prepared For A Passel Of EU Legislation On Copyright And Related Rights 21/11/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments This week several committees in the European Parliament voted on a pile of copyright-related dossiers, and in some instances the steps taken were really small. But the issues include controversial aspects in the legislative drafts on copyright review, broadcasting content and digital content, such as an obligation for providers to monitor third party content, intermediary liability and website blocking.
Retail Giant Amazon Faces Pushback Over .Amazon Geographic Domain At ICANN Annual Meeting 30/10/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments ABU DHABI, UAE — Government representatives from several countries in the Amazonas region clashed with a team of lawyers and communication officers of the global retailer Amazon over the top-level domain .amazon during the Annual Meeting of the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names Numbers (ICANN) in Abu Dhabi today.
Staff Union Welcomes Next EPO President, Hopes For Dialogue 23/10/2017 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment In a letter to its members, the Staff Union of the European Patent Office (SUEPO) in The Hague, Netherlands has welcomed the election of Antonio Campinos as new President of the EPO a week ago, expressed hope for a change in EPO management-workforce relations and has some recommendations for next steps.
World Health Summit: Failing Business Models In AMR And Vaccination 19/10/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment BERLIN — With antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on the rise worldwide there is no time to lose for developing new antibiotic drugs, experts said during one of the last panels of this year’s World Health Summit in Berlin Tuesday. As in several other rounds during the three-day event, industry representatives underlined that there is an issue with the business model due to high risk and low return of investment for research in this area.
Reckoning With The “System Battistelli” 16/10/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment MUNICH — Considerable quality problems in the examination and processing of patent applications at the European Patent Office (EPO) were deplored by a group of patent attorneys during a visit of the new Chair of the EPO Administrative Board, Christoph Ernst, from the German Ministry of Justice, to the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research in Munich. Meant as a presentation of Ernst’s thoughts on “the future of the European patent system,” the debate developed into a harsh reckoning of the “System Battistelli.”
CopyCamp Conference Discusses Fallacies Of EU Copyright Reform Amid Ideas For Copy Change 02/10/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments Bugs in the European Union copyright reform were discussed during the 6th edition of the annual Warsaw CopyCamp held last week. Liability of platforms and special intellectual property rights on snippets were the poster child for bad legislation. But the activists, academics and internet companies also expressed concerns over a general backlash on internet openness and internet freedom.
G7 ICT Ministers: Free Data Flows, More Access To Data, But IP Protection Nevertheless 26/09/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment Openness, security and the support for innovation through the empowerment of small and medium companies are the three core points of the joint statement of the G7 ICT Ministers after their two-day meeting in Turin, Italy ending today. While the host, Italian Minister of Economic Development Carlo Calenda, heavily underlined the need to avoid in digitalisation policies the mistakes made in globalisation, many topics of the final statement point to highly familiar commitments, with better protection of intellectual property being one.
German Court: Thumbnail Images In Search Engines Not A Copyright Violation 21/09/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment In a noteworthy ruling, the German Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe today decided that the use of picture search engines and the publishing of the resulting thumbnails and reference links does not violate German copyright law (I ZR 11/16 – Vorschaubilder III) . The case that had been brought by US adult content provider Perfect 10 against AOL Germany turned out favourable to Google in the end, whose picture search engine had been the tool in question.
Temporary Compulsory License For Antiretroviral Drug Upheld By German Court 17/07/2017 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment MUNICH — The German Federal Supreme Court in a decision drawing significant attention on 11 July upheld a temporary compulsory licence granted for the HIV drug Isentress (X ZB 2/17). The antiretroviral drug, based on raltegravir, has been the object of a prolonged court fight between Japanese drug company Shionogi and its US competitor Merck.
Intermediaries Could Be Made Liable In EU Copyright Legislation 14/07/2017 by Monika Ermert for Intellectual Property Watch 3 Comments Positions on the new draft European Union Copyright Directive lie so far apart in the European Parliament that compromise before an expected October vote seems nearly impossible. Critics of a new special copyright for press publishers – and of a radical change towards holding internet intermediaries liable for what their users upload – were highly alarmed by this week’s developments in Brussels.