Tag: WIPO

WIPO responds on COVID

Sean Flynn at the American University Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property has posted about the World Intellectual Property Organization’s action with regard to coronavirus and intellectual property, some of which is responsive to the open letter I blogged about last month. Flynn writes, “The new initiatives and statement respond to many of the issues raised in an earlier letter from a broad coalition to WIPO’s Director General asking for a clear stance on intellectual property and the COVID pandemic.”

Open letter to WIPO re coronavirus

I was very happy to sign an open civil society letter to the World Intellectual Property Organization regarding urgent issues involving intellectual property and the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. It is still open for signatures.

The letter asks WIPO for four things:

  • Encourage countries that are members of WIPO to “take advantage of flexibilities … that permit uses of intellectual property-protected works for online education, for research and experimental uses, and for vital public interests, such as access to medicine and culture.”
  • Call on “all right holders to remove licensing restrictions that inhibit remote education, research … and access to culture … both to help address the global pandemic, and in order to minimise the disruption caused by it.”
  • Support Costa Rica’s request that the World Health Organization create rights pool of technology and data related to COVID-19, and also promoting measures such as compulsory license, antitrust enforcement, eliminate barriers to the making and selling of diagnostics and treatments.
  • Support the rights of countries to take advantage of exceptions in intellectual property law, including trade secret law, “to facilitate greater access to manufacturing information, cell lines, confidential business information, data, software, product blueprints, manufacturing processes, and other subject matter needed to achieve universal and equitable access to COVID-19 medicines and medical technologies as soon as reasonably possible.”