It’s difficult to achieve innovation without the protection of ideas, and as a growing share of global economic value creation and exchange has become knowledge-based, intellectual property rights and protections have become an increasingly important facet of global trade. This category includes all GTIPA-member reports addressing trade and IP issues.
How trade secrets and other IPRs underpin innovation and manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines.
The exhaustion of globalization has increased steadily in recent years. The Covid-19 shock reached the world at the previous height of the systemic conflict between Chinese state capitalism and the increasingly divided transatlantic West. The European Union is largely sluggish in its response. In Europe, on the other hand, the nation-state hierarchies show themselves to be able to act.
The proposed WTO TRIPS waiver would strip pharmaceutical companies of their intellectual property rights and greenlight foreign firms to reproduce versions without licensing agreements or necessary know-how.
The theme of this focus is the phenomenon of "black boxes", partly due to the popular "feedback system" that many digital platforms use to collect data on user satisfaction with the goods or services rendered: given that an algorithm, to certain elementary conditions, it is an intellectual work, the claim to know its precise functioning can be frustrated by the refusal of the company that owns the algorithm to make some parts of it public. Under these conditions, various labor law principles appear inapplicable and obsolete.
In an abrupt and unprecedented move, the Biden administration plans to strip intellectual property rights from American vaccine manufacturers. The administration completely reframed the debate on the pro IP waiver, originally petitioned last fall, by South Africa and India to the WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Council.
Intellectual property rights are at the root of biotechnology R&D and vital to the industry in the Bay Area. In an article on Medium.com, Sean Randolph of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, explains why waiving the intellectual property rights of vaccine producers is not an effective near or long-term strategy.
In a new MLI paper, Nigel Rawson and John Adams delve into how proposed federal regulations designed to slash drug prices would not only be unsustainable, but would further thwart innovation in the already-beleaguered Canadian biopharmaceutical sector.
The following declaration sets out why we believe that divisive proposals before the World Trade Organization to override intellectual property rights to promote local vaccine production would do more harm than good. There are better ways to accelerate vaccine manufacturing based on trust and collaboration.
IP isn't the problem, it's the solution; stealing stuff isn't the solution, it's the problem.
Last week the United States unexpectedly announced that it would join India, South Africa and others in supporting a proposal at the World Trade Organization to temporarily suspend intellectual property rights for Covid vaccines.