We have moved a long way from the days in which any talk of IP at an international level meant calls for harsher protection to foster direct investment. The UN Conference on Trade and Sustainable Development (UNCTAD) has published a report entitled Structural Transformation and Sustainable Development in Africa, and it Read more…
The final version of the Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest has been published (PDF version here). This is a thorough and impressive documents stating the guiding principles towards a positive agenda in the intellectual property debates. The Preamble sets out this masterfully: Time is of the Read more…
This week yours truly has been thinking about net neutrality prompted by a call for regulation in one of the national newspapers (my response here). For those not familiar with the term, net neutrality is one of those annoyingly slippery concepts that defy easy classification. Traditionally, the term has been Read more…
So, the Gay Girl in Damascus ended up being Tom MacMaster, a 40 year-old American student at the University of Edinburgh. It is needless to rehash what has been said, I highly recommend Ethan Zuckerman’s excellent article on the subject. There is however one aspect of the affair that has Read more…
He’s making a list And checking it twice; Gonna find out Who’s naughty and nice… Yes, it’s that time of year again, the intellectual Property naughty list has been published. This year has the longest Priority Watch List that I remember with twelve countries: China, Russia, Algeria, Argentina, Canada, Chile, Read more…
Another year, another Special 301 report on the making. The Special 301 is an annual report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) prepared under section 301 of the Trade Act, in which countries are given disadvantageous marks based on how they enforce intellectual property rights, or whether Read more…
Much virtual and real ink has been spent in the last few days to talk about the role of social media in the Tunisian and Egyptian popular revolts, some more informed, and some making rather grandiose exaggerated claims. One thing is true, while it is impossible to quantify the impact Read more…
I am in Jordan for a WIPO workshop. One of the interesting aspects of being in the Middle East is the presence of a more controlled Internet, and although Jordan’s Internet filtering is light when compared to some of its neighbours, I have encountered some interesting architectural features that seem Read more…
Thanks to La Quadrature Du Net we now have a leak of the consolidated text for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) after the Luzern round of negotiations. It is always difficult to analyse texts that are in the drafting process, but we can now get a better idea of possible Read more…
When talking about the spread of information and communication technologies, I often hear well-intentioned objections to the generalised use and inception of these technologies. “The newspaper will soon be dead”; “everyone will be using iPhones/iPads/insert-shiny-gadget”; “everyone should have broadband”. These general statements undoubtedly require caveats, not everyone in the world Read more…