The Internet Society (ISOC) and World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee celebrated the web’s twentieth anniversary in Geneva yesterday. As the web continues to grow in all aspects of society and business, the ISOC acknowledges the “freely accessible standards” and “open model of development” inherent in the internet that have promoted innovation and made the […]

A new bill introduced Thursday in the US House of Representatives could, if passed, create a pathway for generic versions of complex medications, called biologics, to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. Bills for such a pathway have been introduced before, but none have yet passed. Teva Pharmaceuticals, a leading generics manufacture […]

A letter to the European Commissioner from the European Generic Medicines Association expresses concern about the detention of medicines in the Netherlands while en route from India to Brazil. While counterfeit medicines deserve “criminal and civil sanctions” as well as seizures, the letter says, “alleged patent infringement cannot be confused with counterfeit and public health […]

US President Barack Obama’s trade policy for 2009 is now available, and is available from the US Trade Representative website.

The Kerala province of India earned two geographic indications, or product names associated with a particular place and characteristics, on rice varieties in November 2007. But, more than a year later, the farmers who grow those strains still have yet to see any economic benefit, says LiveMint, a Wall Street Journal blog. Interviews with farmers […]

Many least developed countries have slipped further behind the most developed nations in information and communications technology access since 2002, the United Nations reported Monday. Sweden and its northern European neighbours again topped the list of the most connected countries, while African countries showed particularly troubling signs, with just 5 percent internet penetration – even […]

Gary Locke, the former governor of Washington State, is the latest pick of US President Obama for Commerce Secretary. The US Chamber of Commerce, a business lobby group based in Washington, DC, has reviewed his record on intellectual property. Posted on their blog, the review lists past actions by Locke on IP enforcement, primarily to […]

Capacity to make vaccines needed to respond to pandemic influenza has increased 300 percent, according to collaborative study [pdf] by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) released Tuesday. However, it has not increased enough to meet global need in the actual case of a global pandemic. […]

As the world becomes increasingly digitised, the question of who owns the uploaded pieces of people’s lives — their photographs, their missives to friends, their posted musings and blog entries — is clearly an issue capable of generating a lot of passion. This was powerfully evidenced last week when popular social networking site Facebook changed […]