19 July 2008

International agendas

Leave a Comment / Enforcement / /

WTO and EU …

IP Watch reports that IP is on the agenda next week (beginning 21 July) in the DOHA negotiations and identifies key issues raised by a “regional groupings such as African, Caribbean and Pacific developing nations in league with Brazil, China, India and Europe” here.

More GIs and better acknowledgement of traditional knowledge seem to be the main concern. Australia is one of the opponents – which makes sense at least in respect of GIs.

Also, IP Watch reports on IP developments in the EU including an extension of term for copyright in sound recordings (also known as Cliff Richard’s superannuation?) Get ready for pressure to increase copyright protection here by another 25 years! IPKat’s take here.

There is also a discussion paper on copyright exceptions on the internet. One might hope that this means they have discovered they have gone too far, but where the EU is concered it usually means that copyright owners’ rights need to be improved.

Then, there is to be an investigation into the quality of industrial property rights.

The IP News report has links to the EU papers.

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Innovators and entrepreneurs

Leave a Comment / Technology / /

Joshua Gans says he has been teaching this case study to his MBA students …

Flash of Genius.

On a similar theme, IPRoo attended the launch of Measured Success, Innovation Management in Australia and found an IP lawyer’s vision of nirvana:

“Adrian Hunter went beyond the usual practice of inviting patent attorneys to attend the first meeting of the project. He invited them to attend all of the quarterly meetings for the five-year duration of the project….

In addition to allowing the patent attorneys to think about their patent strategy very early on in the process, this experiment facilitated two fundamentally important information transfers of tacit knowledge, one from the patent attorneys to the scientists, and the other from the scientists to the patent attorneys…

The scientists started to understand, at a much deeper level, the notion of a patent as a strategic weapon…the patent attorneys learned what it was that the scientists had actually created…The consequences of these information transfers were quite dramatic…”

Perhaps you should send a copy to your clients in case they go to see Flash of Genius?

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Jib Jab did it again!

Leave a Comment / Copyright / /

The folks who brought us This Land have now found

Time for some campaignin’ …

here.

Now, why does that tune sound so familiar?* Why does the scenery behind Barack Obama seem familiar?

According to Excess Copyright, it wouldn’t be legal in Canada.

But is it parody or satire?

Fortunately, in a country where a clip of the Prime Minister singing happy birthday to “a” cricketer was neither news nor criticism/review (see here [34] and [39] then here), we now have fair dealing for both parody and satire.

Do you think they took too much? Surely, they added enough original contribution?
* here – I’m not going to suggest you click on the number 56

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