UN report on patents and innovation

“History has shown… that companies and countries which continue to invest in new products and innovation during times of economic recession will be those that will be best positioned to take advantage of the recovery, when it arrives,” said WIPO Director General Francis Gurry.
Demand for international trademarks and patents dropped last year in the wake [...]

Ministers from Least-Developed Countries develop strategy to encourage local innovation and investment

Ministers and other senor government officials from least developed countries agreed to a strategy for using intellectual property to encourage local innovation and encourage foreign investment at a recent WIPO Forum.  The ministers also discussed the challenges facing LDCs in this area, in particular the difficulties for LDCs to obtain better access to technological information.
WIPO [...]

Incentives important to stimulate drug development – WHO

Pharmaceutical firms need incentives, including lucrative patents, to keep creating drugs and vaccines against emergent threats such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic, the World Health Organisation’s head said on Tuesday.
“Progress in public health depends on innovation. Some of the greatest strides forward for health have followed the development and introduction of new medicines and vaccines,” [...]

Japan, China Start Group on Intellectual Property Rights

Bloomberg reported that Economic ministers from Japan and China will start a working group on protecting intellectual property rights as part of an effort to tighten economic ties during the global recession.
Asia’s two largest economies agreed to set up a working group to discuss intellectual property, implement economic measures pledged at the Group of 20 [...]

World IP Day 2009

As designated by the World Intellectual Property Organization, April 26th is World IP Day…  Each year, WIPO and its Member States celebrate World Intellectual Property Day with activities geared towards increasing public understanding of what IP really means, and to demonstrate how the IP system fosters not only music, arts and entertainments, but also all the [...]

China to strengthen protection of intellectual property rights

Protection of intellectual property rights is necessary not only for economic development and country-to-country exchanges, but is also a matter of respecting the value of people’s work, stated Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
Wen was speaking yesterday in a meeting with Francis Gurry, director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).  Premier Wen also said his government [...]

TACD meeting on Patents, Copyright and Knowledge Governance

The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue recently hosted a meeting in Washington D.C. on Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance.  Panellists were charged with making 2-3 concrete policy recommendations re IP for the incoming Obama administration.  While no consensus was reached, and in fact only a few of the presenters actually provided specific policy recommendations, there were some interesting presentations [...]

Backgrounder on compulsory licensing

The Council on Foreign Relations recently posted an interesting article which discusses global trade rules for intellectual property in the context of access to essential medicines.  The following is a brief overview of the article: 
In 1995, members of the WTO ascribed to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which established minimum levels [...]

New National Intellectual Property Strategy for Barbados

Experts from the public and private sectors participated yesterday in a National Consultation on the Formulation of a National Intellectual Property Strategy for Barbados, hosted by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and International Business.
Donville Inniss, the Minister of State in the Ministry of International Business said the strategy would assist in realizing the full potential [...]

Members of WHO Expert Working Group on R&D Financing announced

IP Watch reports that the World Health Organization has released a long-awaited list of high-level experts tasked with finding innovative funding mechanisms for needed medical research on neglected diseases. The list largely contains governmental and intergovernmental representatives.  The list of Expert Working Group members is available from the WHO website.
This group will examine current financing [...]