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.
Archive for April, 2009
Comment on WIPO Study on exclusions from Patentability and Exceptions and Limitations
Friday, April 10th, 2009Tracing the Root Causes of the Economic Crisis: Labour and Trade
Friday, April 10th, 2009The biggest lesson we may learn from the current global economic crisis is that mainstream economic theories that have guided thinking for the last four or so decades have serious flaws. In sum these theories advocated the idea that things should be left to the markets and, the market via, the “invisible hand” would ensures that gains from trade and investment liberalization would “trickle down” to society. However, significant evidence, which had largely been ignored before, suggest that there was inadequate trickle down and, in some cases, there was “trickle up”, that is, resources flowing from the poor to the rich.
2 Women and 18 Men: The G20 Summit
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Two women (Merkel of Germany and Kirchner of Argentina) and their 18 male colleagues from the other G20 countries are meeting in London tomorrow to try and lay out a roadmap for addressing the global financial crisis. The London Summit is supposed to focus on stabilising the world economy and laying the foundation to restore growth and jobs. Stimulus packages, global financial regulation, trade financing as well as trade protectionism are all on the table. Because countries like China, India and Brazil are in the group the G20 boasts of not only representing more than 85% of the world’s GDP but also about two thirds of the world population.
