Dick Kawooya and Sisule Musungu – Recommendation 34 of the WIPO Development Agenda calls upon WIPO to “conduct a study on contraints to intellectual property prtotection in the informal economy, including the tangible costs and benefits of intellectual property protection in particular in relation to generation of employment”. This Recommendation was formulated based on an original proposal by the African Group at WIPO. Consequently, while the Recommendation is relevant to all developing countries, it is of particular interest to Africa. The WIPO Secretariat has now prepared a Discussion Paper as a basis for the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) to decide on the way forward in implementing the Recommendation. In essence, however, the Discussion Paper mainly seeks to frame the questions that ought to be asked as opposed to providing substantive suggestions.
Archive for the ‘IP and Development’ Category
Intellectual Property Dynamics in Africa’s Informal Economies
Friday, November 26th, 2010Cutting edge fixed-dose brand HIV drug combinations to speed up enforcement of UNITAID patent pool plan
Monday, June 7th, 2010Daniele Dionisio - New to IQsensato’s Guest Papers section is a short paper entitled Cutting edge fixed-dose brand HIV drug combinations to speed up enforcement of UNITAID patent pool plan contributed by myself (Member, European Parliament Working Group on Innovation, Access to Medicines and Poverty-Related Diseases).
Three books on IP launched in Brazil
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010Pedro Paranagua – Brazil’s Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), a higher education institution comprised of four Schools (Economic, Business, Law, and Social Science), placed amongst the world’s top-5 “policy-maker think-tank” according to the US magazine Foreign Policy has launched three new books (in Brazilian Portuguese) on intellectual property -related fields.
The Public Domain Manifesto
Monday, February 8th, 2010Pedro Paranagua – The Public Domain Manifesto, which was produced within the context of COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the digital public domain, has recently been launched. The Manifesto is a timely reminder that the public domain “is the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these barriers.”
Stuck in the First Gear: Moving Forward the Discussion on International Transfer of Technology – Part II
Saturday, February 6th, 2010Robinson Esalimba – One of the renowned American inventors from the last century and former head of research at General Motors, Charles Kettering, was famous for his snazzy quotes and sound bites. One of my favourites is; “A problem well stated, is a problem half solved.” I couldn’t agree more. In the first part of my post on Stuck in the First Gear, I suggested that the draft WIPO proposal on Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer (CDIP/4/7) which is up for discussion at the fifth session of the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) from April 26 to 30, 2010; is unlikely, as currently framed, to move forward the discussion on transfer of technology. This is because the problem has not been well stated.
