Issue Of The Week: Patent Talks Perk Up
Surf on over to CongressDaily's TechCentral for a new "Issue of the Week." Here's a taste:
GENEVA, Switzerland -- After several years of stalemate, global discussions on patent policy have begun stirring again, this time with a public-interest twist. And it may just be coincidence that this comes at a time when domestic patent reform legislation is beginning to move in Congress. Member governments of the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization met here last week and began setting the groundwork for a new global patent policy agenda that could contribute to broad policy concerns such as climate change and public health.
The filing and use of patents on innovation has led to enormous wealth for companies and economies in parts of the world like the United States, and patent filing is rapidly rising in others, like China. Proponents call intellectual property rights the main source of wealth for firms, and argue that they hold their value in economic uncertainty. But attitudes about patents and the use of patent systems differ around the world. Patent holders have been trying for years unsuccessfully to improve harmonization among those systems to ease barriers to protection and enforcement of their rights.
But many developing countries have resisted erecting new international rules on IP, in part because they are still struggling with implementation of the 1994 World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which raised commitments on IP rights protection. Read the full story here.
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