It is truly incredible that most of the advocates of this trade policy do not even seem to understand the class nature of their agenda, equating the interests of a tiny group at the top with the interests of the whole country....Truthout
I don’t think it’s in the long term interests of the United States to enter a sort of arms race in this area. Because I think that’s going to produce a frightening kind of dystopian world. We have a lot of choices about the future that we can create. And unfortunately, I think intellectual property, the privatization of science, an arms raced mentality when it comes to the use of science, is going to produce the sort of sci-fi future that none of us really want, a kind of dark, dystopian one. We could have a very different one of course....TRNN
Donald Trump has proved the skeptics wrong, it seems that the American people stand to be big winners as a result of his trade war. The Chinese government announced a major initiative to promote the manufacture and use of generic drugs....
This can matter hugely for people in the United States since if China joins India as a mass producer of high quality generic drugs it will become increasingly difficult for the U.S. drug companies to maintain an island of protected prices in the United States....
A Chinese court has ruled in favor of Apple Inc. in design patent disputes between it and a domestic phone-maker, overturning a ban on selling iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus phones in China.
Last May, a Beijing patent regulator ordered Apple's Chinese subsidiary and a local retailer Zoomflight to stop selling the said phones after Shenzhen Baili Marketing services Co. (Shenzhen Baili) lodged a complaint to it, claiming that the patent for the design of its mobile phone 100c was being infringed upon by the iPhone sales.
Apple and Zoomflight took the Beijing Intellectual Property Office's banning order to court.
The Beijing Intellectual Property Court on Friday revoked the ban, saying Apple and Zoomflight did not violate Shenzhen Baili's design patent for 100c phones.
The court ruled that the regulator did not follow due procedures in ordering the ban while there is no sufficient proof to claim the designs constitute violation of intellectual property rights.
Representatives of Beijing Intellectual Property Office and Shenzhen Baili said they would take time to decide whether to appeal the ruling.
In another related ruling, the same court denied a request by Apple to demand stripping Shenzhen Baili of its design patent for 100c phones. Apple first filed the request to the Patent Reexamination Board of State Intellectual Property Office. The board rejected the request, but Apple lodged a lawsuit against the rejection to court.
The Beijing Intellectual Property Court on Friday ruled to maintain the board's decision. It remains not immediately clear if Apple will appeal....China.org.cn
On 2 May 2016, US President Barack Obama published an op-ed in the Washington Post in an attempt to bolster support for the highly controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP has become a political football in the US election primaries, with all of the leading candidates for President expressing their opposition to it.
Obama’s main argument was that the US should be writing the trade rules of the 21st century, rather than ‘countries like China’.
Obama was alluding to the latest round of negotiations for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), recently held in Perth. This agreement includes China, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India and the 10 countries that make up ASEAN. Obama seems to be concerned that RCEP won’t mirror the TPP’s stance on issues like intellectual property protection.
Health and environmental groups, on the other hand, are worried that RCEP could indeed be a TPP 2.0. They are particularly concerned that it may make life-saving medicines more costly and threaten the right of states to regulate in the public interest.…Economy Watch
The administration and its supporters on this issue, including leading Republicans, argue that the case for TPP rests on basic economic principles and is only strengthened by the findings of modern research. On both counts their claims are greatly exaggerated – particularly with regard to the notion that more trade, on these terms, is necessarily better for the United States.
There is a strong theoretical and empirical case – dating back to David Ricardo in 1817 – that freer trade should make countries better off. However, modern-day trade agreements, including those currently being negotiated, are very different from earlier experiences with trade liberalization.
The TPP is not only – perhaps not even mostly – about freer trade, and thus who gains and who loses is very much dependent on what exactly are the details of the agreement. The exact nature of the provisions matters and at this point, because the TPP text is not available to the public, we cannot be sure whom this trade agreement will help or hurt within the United States or elsewhere.The Baseline Scenario
To sum up, although China’s officials have underscored their openness to the TPP, it is not at the forefront of their agenda, and TPP nations would be naïve to think that China would participate in any pact that would increase its cost of doing business. Whether and when free trade cooperation on both sides of the Pacific will come about is anyone’s guess, but for now, for China, the TPP is a non-starter.
Prof Brook K Baker, Professor of Law at Northeastern University, cautions that the Modi government’s accelerating flirtation with the US and its investors is dangerous to hundreds of millions of people worldwide whose lives depend on Indian generics.The new maharajas — same as the old maharajas. Rent-seekers to the core who love to live high off rent extraction love use schemes to create artificial scarcity, because competition.
Apparently if you are the world’s richest oil company used to making $104 million in profit every day, no lawsuit is too frivolous, expensive or downright hilarious when you are the plaintiff. That’s the message from ExxonMobil this week as it filed a lawsuit against the FX television network. In court papers, the oil behemoth effectively argues that it owns the exclusive right to put two X’s next to each other....
Many of the aforementioned suits — including ExxonMobil’s — seem more than a bit absurd. Then again, the Supreme Court just ratified the right of companies to claim patent protections for DNA. So in the brave new world of intellectual property, “absurd” is apparently in the eye of the beholder.AlterNet
Obama administration task force wants to make unauthorized streaming a felony (via Raw Story )The U.S. Department of Commerce wants to crack down on the unauthorized streaming of video and audio content by reviving a provision of the Stop Online Piracy Act. In a report released last week, the Commerce Department’s Internet Policy Task Force…
Apple may have just lost a key battle in China before they even began to fight it.
A report by Chinese electronics site GizChina claims that a company called GooPhoneboasted that it has obtained a Chinese patent on the design of Apple’s iPhone 5, taken fromleaked photos of the device that were published online.
Their phone, the GooPhone i5, will reportedly ship with Android 4.0 and some pretty capable hardware, including a quad-core 1.4Ghz processor, an 8 mega-pixel camera, a high-def screen and even an Android desktop theme designed to look just like an iPhone’s characteristic layout.The Raw Story
GooPhone is one of many Chinese electronics knockoff-makers that have gotten especially good at their mimicry in recent years, but if it’s true that they’ve obtained a patent on the iPhone 5′s design before Apple even announced it, that could give them leverage in the courts — possibly even enough to challenge Apple’s right to sell its device in the country.
And while the GooPhone i5 is clearly an abuse of the Chinese patent system and a case of brazen theft of intellectual property, it’s not clear if Apple would overcome such a challenge, or if a victory would even shut GooPhone down.
Chinese intellectual property laws have been overhauled to allow the nation's drug makers to make less expensive copies of medicines still under patent protection.
The move by China, considered a vital growth market for foreign pharmaceutical companies, comes within months of a similar action by India.
The amended patent law allows Beijing to issue compulsory licenses to eligible companies to produce generic versions of patented drugs during state emergencies, unusual circumstances, or in the interests of the public.
For "reasons of public health", eligible drug makers can also ask to export these medicines to other countries, including members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
"The revised version of Measures for the Compulsory Licensing for Patent Implementation came into effect from May 1, 2012," China's State Intellectual Property Office said in a faxed statement to the Reuters news agency.
China is known to be looking at Gilead Sciences Inc's Tenofovir, which is recommended by the World Health Organisation as part of a first-line cocktail treatment for AIDS patients, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
In March India granted a compulsory license to local generic drugs firm Natco Pharma to manufacture Bayer's cancer drug Nexavar, used for treating kidney and liver cancer.Read the rest at Al Jazeera
It began with a frustrated blogpost by a distinguished mathematician. Tim Gowers and his colleagues had been grumbling among themselves for several years about the rising costs of academic journals.Read the rest at Raw Story
They, like many other academics, were upset that the work produced by their peers, and funded largely by taxpayers, sat behind the paywalls of private publishing houses that charged UK universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the privilege of access.
There had been talk last year that a major scientific body might come out in public to highlight the problem and rally scientists to speak out against the publishing companies, but nothing was happening fast.
So, in January this year, Gowers wrote anarticle on his blog declaring that he would henceforth decline to submit to or review papers for any academic journal published by Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals in the world.
He was not expecting what happened next. Thousands of people read the post and hundreds left supportive comments. Within a day, one of his readers had set up a website, The Cost of Knowledge, which allowed academics to register their protest against Elsevier.
The site now has almost 9,000 signatories, all of whom have committed themselves to refuse to either peer review, submit to or undertake editorial work for Elsevier journals. “I wasn’t expecting it to make such a splash,” says Gowers. “At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up.”
The whole whoopee cushion of words over the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act got me thinking about Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
Those two were the most pop-culture-savvy leaders of the group of agitprop rebels who promoted ‘free’ as a lifestyle a generation ago—the Yippies. But, even for them, it was not easy to say exactly what free meant.
