Posts Tagged: "International"

The third witness at the House foreign affairs subcommittee hearing was Matthew Parish, legal counsel to WIPO Staff Council. He testified on behalf of WIPO Staff Council members, who are prohibited by the Director General from providing testimony on issues related to whistleblowing or wrongdoing. “It is not an exaggeration to say that members of the Staff Council live in daily fear for their jobs and their careers,” Parish’s statement reads. “WIPO seems to have set a new low when it comes to accountability and management of its affairs.” Parish also spoke to secret raids ordered by Gurry to obtain personal effects from staff members for the collection of DNA as well as Gurry’s actions in dismantling a disciplinary regime in place at WIPO.

Based on my experience I can report to you that the vast majority of the people at WIPO are competent, dedicated and deliver as required, many of them well beyond that. But this belies a profoundly serious problem with governance. The agency, in my opinion, is run by a single person who is not accountable for his behavior. He is able to rule as he does only with the tacit cooperation of member countries who are supposed to act as WIPO’s board of directors. And he is ultimately protected by an anachronistic shield of diplomatic immunity.

Although the Chinese Patent Law is a mere 31 years old, it has already gone through 3 major revisions, the last being 6 years ago. In its most recent effort, China just released the “Draft 4th Amendments to the Chinese Patent Law” for public comments, which are due by Jan 1, 2016. The proposed amendments will significantly strengthen areas such as patent enforcement and broaden design patent protection.

In order to reach an agreement the United States granted a key concession relating to biologics, which are advanced medicines made from living organisms. Presently the United States provides 12 years of data exclusivity for these types of medicines, but the TPP agreement knocks that term down to 5 years. Sources have confirmed to me that a TPP deal that so substantially reduced biologic data exclusivity will face an uphill battle in Congress.

A recent trend towards compulsory licensing has also raised red flags for many. In March 2012, the Indian Patent Office granted the country’s first compulsory license to a domestic pharmaceutical company for a cancer drug developed by Bayer AG. At a time when India’s economy is climbing to new heights and foreign investors are interested in entering the market, some find the fact that the Indian government would essentially commandeer foreign IP to be threatening.

The intellectual property community has become familiar with scandals over the last decade as well, although nothing that rivals the audacity of the reported FIFA scandal to be sure. A little more than a year ago, despite numerous Gurry scandals, without any objection and by consensus, the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) appointed Francis Gurry to a second six-year term of office as Director General of the Organization. Gurry himself originally came to power after Kamil Idris, Director General of WIPO from from 1997 to 2008, was forced to step down a year early from the position due to allegations of misconduct. But will Gurry remain at the helm of WIPO for his full six-year term?

An interview with Jim Pooley, former Deputy Director General of WIPO – The actual changes that we might have to accept in a truly globalized, harmonized system are not going to be that difficult for us. The real difficulty is getting everybody to agree on one set of best practices. That, it turns out, is a political road that is just as difficult now as it ever has been. But the goal is clear, the goal is compelling and I think all of us need to work as hard as we can to push things in that direction. First of all we’ve got to get the industrialized countries to agree on a single approach, or at least an understood and aligned approach, to a grace period. Once that happens I think the other issues that we have to deal with will fall into place. We have to keep in mind that while the politicians or diplomats argue with one another, we have sitting on the sidelines all of our clients who are cheering for harmonization. They want to see this happen. And at the end of the day politicians need to recognize it’s the users of the patent system that own it and we need to make sure that they get the system that they deserve.

The challenges to the global IP system, however, go much, much deeper than mere debates over so-called patent trolls or patent quality. The very premises of our intellectual property laws — the economic value of the intellectual property system itself — are now in deep dispute, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. Indeed, global anti-IP sentiment seems to be at its highest level since the late 1860s, when opponents of intellectual property rights succeeded — for a time, at least — in abolishing or weakening the patent systems of several nations around the world.