tisiwoota

This window belongs to a popular and (says LonelyPlanet) reputable tourist agency (run by Australians). The message reads:
Please be aware of All FAKE Kangaroo Cafes
especially the idiots at 83 Ma May St. & 16 Hang Be St.
(opposite Handspan Travel).
They’ll steal your money like they stole our name
There is also no Kangaroo Hotel.
Kangaroo Cafe tours are ONLY available here
at our cafe

Hmmm. So much for trademark protection. Intellectual property protection is incrementally getting better in this country, and the pace of improvement should accelerate in response to increased pressure from the US (and other countries) and Vietnam’s obligations as a newly-minted member of the WTO. But the window writing above– and the proliferation of pirated CD/DVD shops nearby (more in the area than last year!), not to mention the ease of acquiring fake Burberry and Louis Vuitton products– illustrates where the starting point for this improvement lays. I remember hearing a story about a popular restaurant that was illicitly replicated– from the menu down to the color scheme, layout, and furniture– just a few doors down to the original. I had a vague sense last year that Vietnam sported an infringement level typical of many Asian countries, but it was not until just before my current trip that I learned from a USTR report that Vietnam has the highest rates of copyright infringement in the world. The report emphasized that in some Vietnamese cities, 95 to 99% of copyrighted goods are pirated. I think the statistics are at least four or five years old; considering that the USTR has used the exact same phrase in its Vietnam reports for several years back, but it seems likely that the current rates would not be off by more than a few percent, at least from my anecdotal impressions.

I confess that I find the length of protection for copyright (50 years plus life of the author, thanks to Sonny Bono and Disney lobbying) and trademark (renewable for an unlimited number of ten year terms; essentially forever if they are not abandoned) to be absurd. Not having taken a copyright/trademark course yet, I do not fully understand all the reasons for making those kinds of protection longer than patent protection (20 years). But being here does underscore some of the public policy rationales for copyright/trademark protection, such as consumer protection. I read an article about how one of the leading reputable bottled water brands (LaVie) is often aped in label design and through confusingly similar names (Lavie) by makers that often use tap water instead of spring water. That the fakers don’t copy the name and label exactly suggests there is some fear of legal repercussions, but it seems brands here are able to get away with far more infringement than in the US.

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As a bonus, in case you had any doubts about Communist nature of the Vietnam government, here is an excerpt from their copyright law:

The current rules deny protection to works that include any
of the following contents:

4) distorting history, repudiating the achievements of the revolution, offending distinguished persons or national heroes; slandering or injuring the reputation of an organization, or the honor and dignity of an individual.

Warm and cuddly, no?

Since I haven’t seen this reported in MSM, thought I would pass along this news from CPTech’s IP-health listserv (from AsiaTimes):

It seems that director general Lee Jong-wook (who died suddenly last month of a cerebral hemorrhage) bowed to US pressure this past March by removing William Addis from his post as WHO’s country representative to Thailand, because he had written editorials highlighting the damaging consequences of Thailand signing an FTA with the US.

Aldis had made the mistake of penning a critical opinion piece in the Bangkok Post newspaper in February that argued in consonance with WHO positions that Thailand should carefully consider before surrendering its sovereign right to produce or import generic life- saving medicines as allowed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in exchange for a bilateral free-trade agreement (FTA) with the United States, which is currently under negotiation.

Notice that it was “in consonance with WHO positions”– apparently when the US is concerned, it’s dangerous to publicly espouse the official opinions of your own institution!

This comes after a previous scandal, in which an early draft of WHO’s special report on intellectual property rights and public health was apparently leaked to pharmaceutical industry reps for vetting (“[I]n autumn 2005, comments from a pharmaceutical industry representative appeared in the text of a portion of the draft report. . . . In an electronic version of draft report text, the tracking record revealed that comments were made directly into the text by Eric Noehrenberg, a lobbyist with the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations in Geneva.”).

More on the Aldis removal:

The WHO official also wrote that the stricter intellectual-property protection measures in the proposed US-Thai FTA would inevitably lead to higher drug prices and thereby jeopardize the lives of “hundreds of thousands” of Thai citizens who now depend on access to locally produced cheap medicines to survive. He noted too that the Thai government’s current production of generic treatments had allowed the country to reduce AIDS-related deaths by a whopping 79%.

(more…)

Ah, my instincts are getting trained: as soon as I read about Tringo, the game originally created inside an online multiplayer game that has since been sold (by the user who came up with it) for commercial distribution in the “real” world, I thought to myself: Hmm, what are the intellectual rights behind that?

Googling around, I found out that the game explicitly allows users to retain intellectual property rights to their creations.

Fascinating things, these game economies…

What do you gain from allowing users to keep their virtual property?
We get the content. We allow people to create a world which will be thousands of times more compelling than we could create ourselves. To date there are 10 million things built by users in Second Life. In other games, it’s all about getting all of the finite amount of content. Once that’s done, players move on. We’re continually updating with user-created objects so we don’t have to put patches or sequels out.

After the paranoiac nonsense of State of Fear, I’d almost forgotten that Michael Crichton has actual interest in science. Yet now (okay, a week ago), he suddenly comes out with a lucid and important critique of the dangers posed to research by an overly-permissive patent system.

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Unfortunately for the public, the Metabolite case is only one example of a much broader patent problem in this country. We grant patents at a level of abstraction that is unwise, and it’s gotten us into trouble in the past. Some years back, doctors were allowed to patent surgical procedures and sue other doctors who used their methods without paying a fee. A blizzard of lawsuits followed. This unhealthy circumstance was halted in 1996 by the American Medical Association and Congress, which decided that doctors couldn’t sue other doctors for using patented surgical procedures. But the beat goes on.
>>

It’s always a bit startling when someone you’ve written off as irrational comes out of left field with something that’s dead-on coherent…

Actually, it underscores the recent observation that intellectual property rights aren’t an intrinsically partisan issue:

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Intellectual property policy may not be divided along left-right political party lines, participants in a consumer-led conference [in Brussels] on the politics and ideology of intellectual property concluded.

Instead, he said, intellectual property may be divided into roughly two camps: the rights holders and the general public, which both benefits from new work but also bears the cost and thus is the only group that has a balanced view. The problem, according to Pollock, is that the general public is poorly organised and poorly concentrated, as opposed to industry.

IP, patent

Considering all the other crazy things people have tried to snag IP rights for, it’s not surprising someone has come up with this (credit: Siona):

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“The idea is that Keats, 32, sells the rights to his brain, and with it his original thoughts, for perpetuity.

He came up with a novel approach. Keats has registered his brain as a sculpture which he created thought by thought.”

Usually when there’s talk of IP limiting access to biological resources, it’s in reference to patenting traditional medicines, or something along those lines. But a letter to the editor in Nature (via SciDev.net) highlights another connection between the subjects: that copyrighted publications put taxonomic information beyond the reach of those who live in the countries where the species are found. (As the letter-writer points out, developing countries are “home to more than 95% of species whose descriptions have been published”).

“A simple solution would be to treat species descriptions as we do gene sequences, and have them openly accessible. Open-access descriptions of new species could then be a mandatory factor in making them valid under the various codes of biological nomenclature.”

CNN Headline: Poor countries win rules extension

This week the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreed to extend the deadline for least-developed countries to update their intellectual property laws to meet the standards of the TRIPS agreement until 2013. (All member nations of the WTO are signatories to the agreement, but deadlines for compliance were staggered according to level of development. The original deadline for LDCs was January 1, 2006).

This is good news– but only for those countries which have not yet updated their laws, since the WTO decision reportedly states:

Least-developed country Members will ensure that any changes in their laws, regulations and practice made during the additional transitional period do not result in a lesser degree of consistency with the provisions of the TRIPS Agreement.

…In other words, no backtracking. Those countries which have enacted stricter regulations will have to enforce them– regardless of the adverse affects this may have on access to medicines, and other related issues.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything IP-related. Bloomberg has just reported that the Andean nations are putting up resistance to US-trade talks, and demanding protection for traditional medicines.

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“It’s the law of unintended consequences,'’ said Michael Gollin, founder of Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors in Washington, which provides free legal counsel to poor countries in patent disputes. For years the U.S. has pushed these nations to strengthen their patent rules, he said, “and now the countries are learning to use these to their own advantage.'’

The Andean nations want “minor'’ protections for their native plants and the ways they are used, such as a rule requiring companies to inform indigenous tribes of any patent applications based on traditional knowledge and negotiate payment, according to Carlos Correa, a Buenos Aires-based consultant to those nations.
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The Andean nations have long been leaders in addressing biopiracy, and five years ago enacted a joint decision on IP issues which addressed “Biological and Genetic Heritage and Traditional Knowledge”:

Decision 486
Article 3.- The Member Countries shall ensure that the protection granted to intellectual property elements shall be accorded while safeguarding and respecting their biological and genetic heritage, together with the traditional knowledge of their indigenous, African American, or local communities. As a result, the granting of patents on inventions that have been developed on the basis of material obtained from that heritage or that knowledge shall be subordinated to the acquisition of that material in accordance with international, Andean Community, and national law.

The trade talks with the US, of course, go far beyond traditional medicine issues.

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In an illustration of how passionate the issue has become, Colombia’s intellectual-property negotiators resigned their posts in protest in September, complaining that the Colombian trade ministry was likely to accede to U.S. political pressure.
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The chutzpah quote of the article belongs to a PhRMA lobbyist:

“Right now there is no evidence of biopiracy,'’ said Mark Grayson, a spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America in Washington, a lobbying and marketing group that represents drugmakers. “But negotiations are trade- offs, so if that is something they want, what are we going to get in return?‘’ [bold added]

What are US pharmaceutical companies getting in return? You’d think that the Andean nations were the ones initiating imposition of IP obligations on the US! A letter by ten members of Congress spells out the extent of our “return” [if by return, you mean ‘what-we-started-with’] demands:

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Some of these provisions.. facilitate the adoption of standards far beyond those provided in US law. Further, imposing such IP provisions in countries that do not currently have a legal and regulatory framework comparable to that of the United States will serve only to undermine access to affordable medicines in these countries.

…The reality is that IP provisions developed and tailored for the US health care system may be entirely inappropriate for poor countries where few have access even to government clinics, let alone to private hospitals, pharmacies or health insurance.

U.S. Patent Office Publishes the First Patent Application to Claim a Fictional Storyline; Inventor Asserts Provisional Rights Against Hollywood.

This is where allowing ‘business method’ patents has led us.

Could we get any farther from the purpose of having an intellectual property regime? Sigh…

To get a better understanding of the framework of international intellectual property law that relates to the Tamiflu issue, you can check out the WTO’s fact sheet on the TRIPS Agreement, which includes an overview of compulsory licensing:

COMPULSORY LICENSING

The TRIPS Agreement does not specifically list the reasons that might be used to justify compulsory licensing. In Article 31, it does mention national emergencies, other circumstances of extreme urgency and anti-competitive practices — but only as grounds when some of the normal requirements for compulsory licensing do not apply, such as the need to try for a voluntary licence first. Doha declaration 5(b) and (c).

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UPDATE: WTO now also has an FAQ on compulsory licensing, which you might find more accessible reading than the above.

Drug-maker Roche yesterday announced that it would be willing to consider granting licenses for other companies to make its antiviral Tamiflu, after initially refusing to weaken its hold on the patent rights in the event of a pandemic.

Health GAP responds:

Roche’s offer of voluntary licenses is illusory in its present form. First, Roche says that it is prepared to “discuss” licenses, but does
not promise to issue any licenses whatsoever or even to expedite the normal slow pace of licensing negotiations. Second, Roche’s offer does not clarify whether licenses will have restrictive pricing terms whereby Roche can set the selling price and/or require an above-market royalty rate. (Roche could be suggesting that it will cooperate to increase quantities but that it will not reduce price.) Third, Roche does not clarify whether it will impose geographical limitations on sales, thereby limiting access to disfavored markets only. Fourth, Roche does not clarify that it will license manufacturing expertise so that generic products can be brought to market more quickly. Finally, Roche does not clarify that it will assist licensees in obtaining product registration and marketing approval on an expedited basis even where data exclusivity rules might otherwise block registration.