This preliminary WIPO Study prepared for the 13th Session of the WIPO Standing Committee on the Law of Patents (SCP) which took place from 23 to 27 March 2009, while making a useful contribution, falls far short of expectation in terms of advancing the understanding of the subject and moving debate forward. There is no doubt that the study, as most of the others prepared for the same session, breaks from WIPO’s past. It discusses many key issues and makes statements, which only recently would have been considered alarming in WIPO. Paragraphs 3, 9, 31, 33, 36, 37, 59, 63, 72, 73, 90, 95, 96, 97 and 102 are just some examples of interesting and useful lines of discussion. The key failing of the study is the failure to bring to the attention of WIPO Member States a representative picture of the literature on the subject and some of the pertinent discussions such as on how exclusions from patentability and exceptions and limitations to patent rights should be addressed in patent harmonisation or their importance for development. Literature on these issues from a development and IP perspective is essentially ignored, and it is hard to believe that this was inadvertent or that such literature was beyond the scope of the study. It is perhaps for that reason that WIPO Member States decided, at the end of of the 13th Session, that further work on this subject should be commissioned out. (more…)  Read the rest of this entry »