Horticultural Breeders Call For Stronger Protection Of Innovations 23/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment The protection of intellectual property for plant innovation was at the heart of a recent conference on patents and modern plant breeders rights in horticultural breeding.
Greens Call For ‘Social Contract For Digital Age’; Lessig Calls US Hopeless On Copyright Reform 22/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment BERLIN–The United States is hopeless when it comes to a copyright reform for the internet, US Law Professor Lawrence Lessig told the German Green Party’s congress on internet politics on Saturday. Europe, Lessig said, could take the lead with regard to that reform, which is needed but blocked in the US by vested interests.
Peace, Love, and Private Practice: Film Industry Lawyer Ted Shapiro To Depart MPA 22/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments Ted Shapiro, a long-time copyright industry advocate in the European legal trenches for the Motion Picture Association, will leave at year’s end for a private law firm in Brussels.
UN: Governments To Double Biodiversity Funding, Push Access/Benefit-Sharing 22/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment At last week’s high-level meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) governments agreed to double financial flows toward biodiversity by 2015, the CBD has announced. They also came up with strategy to move forward on access and benefit-sharing of biodiversity.
WIPO Members Inch Toward Visually Impaired Treaty 19/10/2012 by Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch 2 Comments After three days of mostly informal discussions and a set of succeeding draft texts of what could become a treaty for visually impaired persons, World Intellectual Property Organization members tonight closed discussions with yet another version of the text showing agreement in some areas and work still to be done.
South Korea Lends IP Training Support To China 19/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment In a move that goes beyond territorial disputes and past atrocities, the Republic of Korea this week hosted a training session for Chinese civil servants on protection of intellectual property rights.
US Court Rules On Fair Use For Blind Users, Digitisation, Amid Treaty Talks 19/10/2012 by Maricel Estavillo for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment Coinciding with the marathon negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization for a potential treaty for the visually-impaired persons, a United States court handed down a ruling this month that goes in favour of copyright exceptions in the digitisation of books for the purposes of preservation, text search and access for the blind.
Subscriber Update: New Document On Visually Impaired Treaty At WIPO 19/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment A new working document on an international instrument on copyright limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons being negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization has been issued this morning. The document is below.
New USPTO Post-Grant Review A Small Step For Patent Harmonisation 18/10/2012 by Steven Seidenberg for Intellectual Property Watch Leave a Comment On 16 September, the United States made its patent system more like everyone else’s. The country began implementing a new patent office procedure for challenging the validity of recently issued patents. This was, however, only a modest step towards harmonisation because the US version of post-grant patent review has little in common with the corresponding processes available in other countries, according to experts.
Pro-Music Re-Launched After Nine Years 18/10/2012 by Intellectual Property Watch 1 Comment Pro-Music, the international alliance of various stakeholders in the music industry promoting the use of legal services on the internet, has moved to give its website a facelift, nine years after it was launched back in 2003.